We study the optimal pattern of outlays for a single firm pursuing an R&D program over time. In the deterministic case, (a) the amount of progress required to complete the project is known, and (b) the relationship between outlays and progress is known. In this case, it is optimal to increase...

The goal of this paper is to study the problem of optimal dynamic policy formulation with competing political parties. We study a general class of problems, in which the two competing political parties have quadratic intertemporal objective functions, and in which the economy has a linear...

A nonlinear programming formulation is introduced to solve infinite horizon dynamic programming problems. This extends the linear approach to dynamic programming by using ideas from approximation theory to avoid inefficient discretization. Our numerical results show that this nonlinear...

We implement a dynamic programming algorithm on a computational grid consisting of loosely coupled processors, possibly including clusters and individual workstations. The grid changes dynamically during the computation, as processors enter and leave the pool of workstations. The algorithm is...

We introduce a novel approach to solving dynamic programming problems, such as those in many economic models, on a quantum annealer, a specialized device that performs combinatorial optimization. Quantum annealers attempt to solve an NP-hard problem by starting in a quantum superposition of all...

We analyze a coordination game with information-constrained players. The players' actions are based on a noisy compressed representation of the game's payoffs in a particular case, where the compressed representation is a latent state learned by a variational autoencoder (VAE). Our generalized...

We propose a new framework for pricing assets, derived in part from the traditional consumption-based approach, but which also incorporates two long-standing ideas in psychology: prospect theory, and evidence on how prior outcomes affect risky choice. Consistent with prospect theory, the...

This paper estimates a model of airline competition that captures the two major features of the industry: product differentiation and economies of density. The results not only provide support to some of the traditional common wisdom in the industry, but are also useful for understanding major...

Does academic economic research produce material of scientific value, or are academic economists writing only for clients and peers? Is economics scholarship uniquely insular? We address these questions by quantifying interactions between economics and other disciplines. Changes in the impact of...

This paper presents stochastic simulation results pertaining to the performance of nominal income targeting, here represented as a monetary policy rule that sets quarterly values of an interest rate instrument in response to deviations on existing studies of nominal income growth from a...