There has been an on-going debate about choices of the most suitable model amongst avariety of model specifications and parameterizations. The first dissertation essay investigateswhether asymmetric leptokurtic return distributions such as Hansen’s (1994) skewed tdistributioncombined with...

There has been an on-going debate about choices of the most suitable model amongst a variety of model specifications and parameterizations. The first dissertation essay investigates whether asymmetric leptokurtic return distributions such as Hansen's (1994) skewed tdistribution combined with...

For a continuous-time financial market with a single agent, we establish equilibrium pricing formulae under the assumption that the dividends follow an exponential Lévy process. The agent is allowed to consume a lump at the terminal date; before, only flow consumption is allowed. The agent's...

This article shows that the nonstandard approach to stochastic integration with respect to (C^2 functions of) Lévy processes is consistent with the classical theory of pathwise stochastic integration with respect to (C^2 functions of) jump-diffusions with finite-variation jump part.It is proven...

The main aim of this thesis is the development of locally risk-minimizing hedging strategies for unit-linked life insurance contracts whose unit is modeled in a general Lévy-process financial market. It therefore merges the quite advanced and in recent years developed theory of...

Gradient-based approaches to direct policy search in reinforcement learning have received much recent attention as a means to solve problems of partial observability and to avoid some of the problems associated with policy degradation in value-function methods. In this paper we introduce GPOMDP,...

Recently, a computationally-efficient method was presented for calibrating a wide-class of Markov processes from discrete-sampled abundance data. The method was illustrated with respect to one-dimensional processes and required the assumption of stationarity. Here we demonstrate that the...

In this dissertation we present mathematical models that help answer health policy questions relating to HIV and Hepatitis C (HCV), and analyze bias in Markov models of disease progression. We begin by developing a Markov decision process model that examines the timing of testing and treatment...

This paper studies airline customers' online search and purchase behaviors. Twofundamental aspects of online behavior are examined: (1) the link between searchbehavior and buying behavior and (2) the evolution of inter-temporal search andpurchase decisions of strategic buyers.In the first study,...

This dissertation consists of three essays that apply both economic theory and econometric methods to understand design and dynamics of institutions. In particular, it studies how institutions aggregate information and deal with uncertainty and attempts to derive implications for optimal...