Many infinite-horizon optimal control problems in management science and economics have optimal paths that approach some stationary level. Often, this path has the property of being the nearest feasible path to the stationary equilibrium. This paper obtains a simple multiplicative...

Cooperative advertising is an incentive offered by a manufacturer to influence retailers' promotional decisions. We study a dynamic durable goods duopoly with a manufacturer and two independent and competing retailers. The manufacturer as a Stackelberg leader announces his wholesale prices and...

The models we present in this chapter are related to two classical inventory models: The EOQ model of Harris (1913) and the dynamic lot size model of Wagner and Whitin (1958). In relation to the EOQ model, our models depart in three different ways: (1) the EOQ model assumes that the problem...

We study sourcing and pricing decisions of a firm with correlated suppliers and a price-dependent demand. With two suppliers, the insight -- cost is the order qualifier while reliability is the order winner -- derived in the literature for the case of exogenously determined price and independent...

Inventory control is among the most important topics in operations research because of large investments in inventory and their effect on the profitability of the firms. A systematic analysis of inventory problems began with the development of the classical EOQ formula of Ford W. Harris in 1913,...

Ever since the publication of Pontryagin's Maximum Principle, the number of its applications to management science problems has been steadily growing. This paper is an up-to-date survey of the applications of the deterministic maximum principle to the three functional areas of management:...

An application of the Stokes' theorem is illustrated by solving the two state problem, with inequality constraints, of Dobell and Ho concerning the optimal investment of resources. Whenever applicable, the Stokes' theorem approach seems to be elegant and parsimonious

We establish the computational complexity of the problem of minimizing makespan in a flowshop, where each jobs requires a pallet the entire time, from the start of its first operation until the completion of the last operation. We prove that the problem is NP-hard in the strong sense for m =2...

This paper considers an optimal control problem with two state variables for the dynamics of the Nerlove-Arrow advertising model. The optimal control is the rate of advertising expenditure required to maximize the present value of net profit streams over an infinite horizon subject to a...