In many real-world applications, there is a growing trend to supplement reserved capacity with on-demand capacity; examples include the deployment of customer-service agents by call centers, servers by cloud-computing providers, and health-care professionals by post-acute-care services. We...

Motivated by the ever-growing complexity of projects and the consistent trend of outsourcing of individual tasks or components, we study the contract-design problem faced by a firm (or organization) for executing a project consisting of multiple tasks, each of which is performed by an individual...

In many practical settings, learning algorithms can take a substantial amount of time to converge, thereby raising the need to understand the role of discounting in learning. We illustrate the impact of discounting on the performance of learning algorithms by examining two classic and...