Studies in the renormalization-prescription dependence of perturbative calculations

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Now that the quantitative testing of perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD) has become a major experimental and theoretical effort, it is important to understand the renormalization-prescription dependence of perturbative calculations. We stress the phenomenological importance of finding a definition of the QCD expansion parameter which reduces the magnitude of high-order corrections. We give explicit arguments suggesting that a choice of coupling based on momentum-space subtraction can be phenomenologically useful. Examples from QCD and QED are used to illustrate these arguments, and we also discuss possibilities for refining them.