  We discuss the phenomenology of initial-state parton-kt broadening in
direct-photon production and related processes in hadron collisions. After a
brief summary of the theoretical basis for a Gaussian-smearing approach, we
present a systematic study of recent results on fixed-target and collider
direct-photon production, using complementary data on diphoton and pion
production to provide empirical guidance on the required amount of kt
broadening. This approach provides a consistent description of the observed
pattern of deviation of next-to-leading order QCD calculations relative to the
direct-photon data, and accounts for the shape and normalization difference
between fixed-order perturbative calculations and the data. We also discuss the
uncertainties in this phenomenological approach, the implications of these
results on the extraction of the gluon distribution of the nucleon, and the
comparison of our findings to recent related work.
