We consider a finite-state, finite-action, infinite-horizon, discounted reward Markov decision process and study the bias and variance in the value function estimates that result from empirical estimates of the model parameters. We provide closed-form approximations for the bias and variance,...

This paper presents a procedure for determining the number of simulation observations required to achieve a preassigned confidence interval for means estimated by simulation. This procedure, which is simple to implement and efficient to use, is compared with two other methods for determining the...

Many simulation experiments are concerned with the estimation of a ratio of two unknown means, the estimation of a conditional probability being an example. We propose confidence intervals for the case in which the ratio is estimated by using independent, identically distributed random pairs...

In this paper, we present a modulated Poisson process model to describe and analyze arrival data to a call center. The attractive feature of this model is that it takes into account both covariate and time effects on the call volume intensity, and in so doing, enables us to assess the...

In this paper, we study the drivers of customer satisfaction for financial services. We discuss a full Bayesian analysis based on data collected from customers of a leading financial services company. Our approach allows us to explicitly accommodate missing data and enables quantitative...

The stock market displays regime switching between upturns and downturns. This paper provides a Bayesian framework for making portfolio decisions that takes this regime switching into account, together with asset pricing model uncertainty and parameter uncertainty. The findings reveal that the...

The majority of papers on stochastic inventory theory make the assumption that the distribution of consumer demand in each time period is known with certainty. While this assumption is unsupported in many applied contexts, it is conventionally held that more realistic models are more difficult...

Data on accident precursors can help in estimating accident frequencies, since they provide a rich source of information on intersystem dependencies. However, Bayesian analysis of accident precursors requires the ability to construct joint prior distributions reflecting such dependencies. For...

This paper introduces a Bayesian decision theoretic model of optimal production in the presence of learning-curve uncertainty. The well-known learning-curve model is extended to allow for random variation in the learning process with uncertainty regarding some parameter of the variation. A...