The Prague Symposia on Asymptotic Statistics represent a twenty years' tradi­ tion of contacts between Czech mathematical statisticians and the conference partic­ ipants. Both, as the organizers hope, return from the Symposia to their work with fresh ideas and new information. The Fifth Prague Symposium was held from September 4 to September 9,1993 at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University. It was sponsored by the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability, the Czech Statistical the Czech Society of Actuaries, Ceska Pojistovna-Insurance and Reinsur­ Society, ance Corporation, and the IFIP WG 7.7. Asymptotic Statistics, a prolific source of methodological concepts, dominated the program of the Symposium. Special sessions were devoted to Mathematics of Insurance and Finance and to Stochastic Programming. The papers presented at the Symposium are published in two parts. Part 1 is .. Part 2 is Number 3, Volume 30 (1994) of the journal Kybernetika, this volume comprising the papers of the authors who were not able to meet the early editorial deadline. The editors of the Proceedings would like to express their sincere thanks to the authors for valuable contributions, to the reviewers for prompt and careful reading the papers, to J. Antoch for his advice with technical part of the Proceedings. Finally they also express their appreciation of the kind cooperation with the Publishing House Physica-Verlag and the journal Kybernetika in bringing out the volumes. Part of the Proceedings was typeset by AN(S-TEX, the macrosystem of the Ame­ rican Mathematical Society.