We consider a principal who periodically offers a fixed, binary, and costly non-monetary reward to agents endowed with private information, to incentivize the agents to invest effort over the long run. An agent's output, as a function of his effort, is a priori uncertain and is worth a fixed...

Descending mechanisms for procurement (or, ascending mechanisms for selling) have been well‐recognized for their simplicity from the viewpoint of bidders — they require less bidder sophistication as compared to sealed‐bid mechanisms. In this study, we consider procurement under each of two...

We study fixed-dimensional stochastic dynamic programs in a discrete setting over a finite horizon. Under the primary assumption that the cost-to-go functions are discrete L♮-convex, we propose a pseudo-polynomial time approximation scheme that solves this problem to within an arbitrary...

We study several dynamic, stochastic inventory control models with integer demands: the newsvendor model, its multi-period extension and a single-product, multi-echelon assembly model. Equivalent linear programs are formulated for the corresponding stochastic dynamic programs, and integrality...