This paper examines open source software development in a competitive environment. The quality of open source software improves over time based upon contributions by firms and users. A firm's decision to contribute is interesting because it also augments competitors' software quality in future...

We examine optimal control decisions regarding pricing, network size and hiring strategy in the context of open source software development. Opening the source code to a software product often implies that consumers would not pay for the software product itself. However, revenues may be...

Firms have the choice of developing software as either open source or closed source. The open-source approach to software development has been advocated as a new and better method for developing high quality software than the traditional closed-source approach. In open source, volunteer...

We solve an agent's optimization problem of meeting demands for cash over time with cash deposited in bank or invested in stock. The stock pays dividends and uncertain capital gains, and a commission is incurred in buying and selling of stock. We use a stochastic maximum principle to obtain...

This note is concerned with the optimality of an (s; S) policy for a single-item infinite-horizon inventory model when the penalty cost is made-up of two parts: A lump-sum cost independent of the amount of the shortage and a variable cost proportional to the amount of the shortage. Using a...

Business environments change over time. They are cyclic, show seasonality or just evolve over time. This is certainly true for customer demand. As a result, stationary demand distributions are crude approximations of true customer behavior at best. Yet, most classical stochastic inventory models...

This paper investigates the dynamic inventory model for the case when production in a period is restricted to a finite set of specified values. The model allows the production rate to be any value in the set (0, P, 2P, ..., mP), where m is a non-negative integer. It is assumed that the setup...

This paper proposes a new methodology to solve partially observed inventory problems. Generally, these problems have infinitedimensional states that are conditional distribution of the inventory level. Our methodology involves linearizing the state transitions via unnormalized probabilities. It...

This paper presents an asymptotic analysis of control models governed by stochastic ordinary differential equations. A sufficient condition of near-optimal controls is given based on Ekeland's principle. It is shown that, under some concavity assumptions, the e-maximum condition in terms of the...