The uncertain nature of the demand for university parking has now created a major problem for university planners. From a facilities planning perspective, it is important to comprehend the probabilistic nature of the demand for parking and parking rules violations. Given this background, in our...

We analyze the temporal control choice problem faced by a manager who uses cell grazing to manage a parcel of rangeland. Specifically, we first delineate the relevant dynamic and stochastic features of a stylized parcel of rangeland. Next, we use a renewal theoretic framework to derive the...

We employ a stochastic dynamic programming approach to study decision making by an individual wishing to have an arranged marriage. First, we show that this individual never opts out of a voluntarily agreed upon marriage. Second, we demonstrate that our marrying individual uses a reservation...

We study the provision of information to tourists in a probabilistic setting. Specifically, we provide answers to three hitherto unstudied questions in the tourism literature. We first delineate a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) model of a tourist information center (TIC) and then we compute...

We first construct a theoretical model of tax evasion in a stylized developing country in which all taxpayers have either high or low income. The key problem is that the high income taxpayers may under report their income. An individual income tax return can only be verified with an audit that...

We analyze the activities of an entrepreneur who must, at each date, decide whether to search for a new production technique or to produce output with an extant technique. Our analysis leads to four results. First, we show that if our entrepreneur rejects a particular production technique at a...

We exploit the public good attributes of Ganges water pollution cleanup and theoretically analyze an aggregate economy of two cities---Kanpur and Varanasi---through which the Ganges flows. Our specific objective is to study whether water pollution cleanup in these two cities ought to be provided...

When it comes to inspections in invasive species management, the literature has shown that there is frequently a tension between economic cost reduction and inspection stringency. As such, we analyze the properties of two probabilistic inspection regimes that are designed to screen arriving...

We study two approaches to the optimal provision of guided tours to tourists by a firm during the slack season. In the "scheduling by numbers" approach, our firm focuses on the number of tourists who must be in our firm's premises before this firm begins to use the tour guide to provide tours to...

Unless there is managerial intervention, the ability of an ecological-economic system to provide humans with key services will decline probabilistically. We model such an ecological-economic system with a Brownian motion process with negative drift. The manager’s goal is to prevent this...