This paper builds a consumer search model where the cost of going back to stores already searched is explicitly taken into account. We show that the optimal search rule under costly recall is very different from the optimal search rule under perfect recall. Under costly recall, the optimal...

A version of the classical secretary problem is studied, in which one is interested in selecting one of the b best out of a group of n differently ranked persons who are presented one by one in a random order. It is assumed that b is bigger than or equal to 1 is a preassigned number. It is...

This article establishes the Poisson optional stopping times (POST) method by [22] as a near-universal method for solving liquidity-constrained American options, or, equivalently, penalised optimal-stopping problems. In this setup, the decision maker is permitted to "stop", i.e. exercise the...

We develop a methodology for studying ''large deviations type'' questions. Our approach does not require that the large deviations principle holds, and is thus applicable to a larg class of systems. We study a system of queues with exponential servers, which share an arrival stream. Arrivals are...

Tucker's well-known combinatorial lemma states that for any given symmetric triangulation of the n-dimensional unit cube and for any integer labeling that assigns to each vertex of the triangulation a label from the set {1,2,...n,-1,-2,....-n} with the property that antipodal vertices on the...

Outcomes of the shallow lake interest conflict are presented in a number of different contexts: quasi-static and dynamic social planning, and quasi-static one-shot and repeated non-cooperative play. As the underlying dynamics are non-convex, the analysis uses geometrical-numerical methods: the...

We study the existence problem of a zero point of a function defined on a finite set of elements of the integer lattice of the n-dimensional Euclidean space. It is assumed that the set is integrally convex, which implies that the convex hull of the set can be subdivided in simplices such that...

In this paper we study a challenging call center operation problem. The goal of our analysis is to identify an optimal policy for allocating tasks to agents. As a first step, we discuss promising randomized policies and use stochastic approximation for finding the optimal randomized policy when...

Contemporary financial stochastic programs typically involve a trade-offbetween return and (downside)-risk. Using stochastic programming we characterize analytically (rather than numerically) the optimal decisions that follow from characteristic single-stage and multi-stage versions of such...