A common myth/conception, based upon the notion of increasing returns to scale in R&D activity, is that large firms account for a disproportionate share of innovations. In this paper we consider three types of informational returns to scale (cheaper, faster, and better) and examine the impact of...

In the standard search problem there is an infinite pool of items whose distribution of values is known. A decision maker draws an item from the pool, observes its value, and decides whether to keep it or to draw another item. He can keep only one item, and he seeks the item with the largest...

Faced with the decision of whether or not to adopt a new technology whose economic value cannot be gauged with certainty, the manager of the firm may elect to decrease the uncertainty by sequentially gathering information (at a unit cost of c 0), updating his prior beliefs in a Bayesian manner....

The profitability of a new technology is rarely known with certainty at its announcement date. Consequently, prior to making an adoption decision it behooves the firm considering the adoption of this innovation to reduce the level of uncertainty associated with its profitability. The firm...

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...

We analyze a decision problem with repeated gambles and find that under some seemingly reasonable risk-averse utility functions, recommended behavior for the initial decision can be highly risk-taking and counterintuitive. Further analysis reveals that the derived utility function for the return...

In this paper we study a model that minimizes the sum of production, employment smoothing, and inventory costs subject to a schedule of known demand requirements over a finite time horizon. The three instrumental variables are work force producing at regular-time, work force producing on...

We consider a deterministic, single product, discrete review, finite time horizon inventory problem, called the multiple set-up cost problem. The holding cost in each period is a nondecreasing (and sometimes concave) function. The distinguishing feature of our model is the ordering cost function...

Using the technique employed by the author in an earlier paper, the existence of an optimal stationary policy that can be obtained from the usual functional equation is again established in the presence of a bound (not necessarily polynomial) on the one-period reward of a semi-Markov decision...

We consider a semi-Markov decision process with arbitrary action space; the state space is the nonnegative integers. As in queueing systems, we assume that {0, 1, 2, ..., n + N} is the set of states accessible from state n in one transition, where N is finite and independent of n. The novel feature...