  We compute the effects of soft gluon resummation for the production of high
mass systems in hadronic collisions. We carefully analyse the growth of the
perturbative expansion coefficients of the resummation formula. We propose an
expression consistent with the known leading and next-to-leading resummation
results, in which the coefficients grow much less than factorially. We apply
our formula to Drell--Yan pair production, heavy flavour production, and the
production of high invariant mass jet pairs in hadronic collisions. We find
that, with our formula, resummation effects become important only fairly close
to the threshold region. In the case of heavy flavour production we find that
resummation effects are small in the experimental configurations of practical
interest.
