In the case of an emergency provoked by a natural event, decision makers should (1) acquire a comprehensive understanding of the current dynamics and (2) take the optimal decision based on the information available at that moment. Scientists should provide the key inputs to decision makers, as...

This book focuses on the diversity of electricity reforms in Western Europe, drawing evidence from ten European Union memberstates plus Norway and Switzerland as associate members. The contributors analyse the various ways of introducing competition in the European electricity industries, and...

In practical portfolio choice models risk is often defined as VaR, expected short-fall, maximum loss, Omega function, etc. and is computed from simulated future scenarios of the portfolio value. It is well known that the minimization of these functions can not, in general, be performed with...

There is a large number of optimisation problems in theoretical and applied finance that are difficult to solve as they exhibit multiple local optima or are not lsquo;well-behaved' in other ways (eg, discontinuities in the objective function). One way to deal with such problems is to adjust and...