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 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...

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...

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...

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 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...

Goods for which demand greatly exceeds supply are frequently allocated to citizens using queuing mechanisms. However, violence can occur either when queues are very long or when large numbers of citizens are not provided goods being allocated with queuing mechanisms. Hence, we use the theory of...

We begin by outlining some of the more salient issues in contemporary research on the management of invasive species. Next, we note that even though there is a sizeable literature in both biology and economics on invasive species management, until very recently, there has been a significant...

Alao and Batabyal (2013) have recently used contract theory to study the sale of package tours to tourists when the tourists can be of two possible types. In this note, we first generalize their analysis by studying the case in which the tourists can be of infinitely many types. Next, we compare...