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...

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 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...

This paper presents a review of recent developments that have taken place in the area of dynamic optimal control models in advertising subsequent to the comprehensive survey of the literature by Sethi in 1977. The basic problem underlying these models is that of determining optimal advertising...

The speed with which an organization takes action against unplanned failure and scrapping of its capital equipment is used as a measure of organizational nimbleness. Operational decisions at the plant level are studied in the setting of the optimal control model of Kamien and Schwarz for...

We develop a general methodology for a partially observed stochastic control problem. The dynamics is governed by a discrete-time Markov process. We describe an application to an inventory system with possibility of shrinkage, and introduce unnormalized conditional probabilities to transform the...

My assignment for this lecture is to discuss applications of optimal control theory to Management Science problems. Since the field of Management Science encompasses production, finance, and marketing as its main functional areas which themselves are rather vast, it will not be possible to...

We consider two control problems on a finite horizon; one stochastic and the other deterministic. In both problems the running cost and the terminal cost are the same. The controllable input in both problems is of an additive nature with cost proportional to the input (which can be both positive...

In this paper we derive useful sufficiency optimality conditions for a class of optimal control problems subject to differential inclusions and involving non-differentiable functions. A production inventory problem is solved to illustrate our results

Sufficient conditions in the form of a maximum principle are obtained for the optimal control of a system described by integro-differential equations and subject to some specified path constraints. The conditions are relaxed to allow for jumps in the adjoint variables at the junction points,...