This discussion paper resulted in a publication in <I>Structural Change and Economic Dynamics</I>, 2013, 24, 141-156.<P> We address the notion of dynamic, endogenous diversity and its role in theories of investment and technological innovation. We develop a formal model of an innovation arising from the...</p></i>

We consider a model for a serial supply chain in which production, inventory, and transportation decisions are integrated, in the presence of production capacities and for different transportation cost functions. The model we study is a generalization of the traditional single-item economic...

In this paper we study a challenging call center operation problem. The goal of our analysis is to identify an optimal policy for allocating tasks to agents. As a first step, we discuss promising randomized policies and use stochastic approximation for finding the optimal randomized policy when...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in <A href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8239378&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S026996481000032X">'Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences'</A>, 25(2), 157-69.<p>A version of the classical secretary problem is studied, in which one is interested in selecting one of the <I>b</I> best out of a group of <I>n</I> differently ranked persons who are...</i></i></p></a>

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://www.springerlink.com/index/J107501580204223.pdf">'De Economist'</A>, 159(3), 323-360.<p>We investigate numerically how indexation of funded pensions for inflation can be differ-entiated across the various groups of fund participants. The pension arrangement is modelledafter the Dutch situation. While the...</p></a>

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in 'Discrete Optimization', 2007, 4, 315-321.<P> In this paper an algorithm is proposed to find an integral solution of (nonlinear) complementarity problems. The algorithm starts with a nonnegative integral point and generates a unique sequence of...</p>

This short paper is a comment on ``Testing for Nonlinear Structure and Chaos in Economic Time Series'' by Catherine Kyrtsou and Apostolos Serletis. We summarize their main results and discuss some of their conclusions concerning the role of outliers and noisy chaos. In particular, we include...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the 'SIAM Journal on Optimization', 2006, 16, 854-870. <P> It is well known that an upper semi-continuous compact- and convex-valued mapping fi from a nonempty compact and convex set X to the Euclidean space of which X is a subset has at least one...</p>

In this paper we study Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems with the restriction that at decision epochs only a finite number of given Markovian decision rules may be applied. The elements of the finite set of allowed decision rules should be mixed to improve the performance. The set of...

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,...