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...

Response Surface Methodology (RSM) is a tool that was introduced in the early 50's by Box and Wilson (1951). It is a collection of mathematical and statistical techniques useful for the approximation and optimization of stochastic models. Applications of RSM can be found in e.g. chemical,...

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...