This paper describes a method to solve the free-boundary problem that arises in the pricing of American options. Most numerical methods for American option pricing exploit the representation of the option price as the expected pay-off under the risk-neutral measure and calculate the price for a...

This study investigates sequential appointment scheduling with service criteria. It uses a constraint-based approach with service criteria bounded in a constraint set in contrast to the more typical weighted linear objective function. Properties are derived and a sequential scheduling algorithm...

Many outpatient clinics are experimenting with open access scheduling. Under open access, patients see their physicians within a day or two of making their appointment request, and long term patient booking is very limited. The hope is that these short appointment lead times will improve patient...

Fuel diversification implies the selection of a mix of generation technologies for long-term electricity generation. The goal is to strike a good balance between reduced costs and reduced risk. The method of analysis that has been advocated and adopted for such studies is the mean-variance...

We show that by modeling the time series of mortality rate changes rather than mortality rate levels we can better model human mortality. Leveraging on this, we propose a model that expresses log mortality rate changes as an age group dependent linear transformation of a mortality index. The...

A practical mathematical programming model for the strategic fuel diversification problem is presented. The model is designed to consider the tradeoffs between the expected costs of investments in capacity, operating and maintenance costs, average fuel costs, and the variability of fuel costs....

We present a method to solve the free-boundary problem that arises in the pricing of classical American options. Such free-boundary problems arise when one attempts to solve optimal-stopping problems set in continuous time. American option pricing is one of the most popular optimal-stopping...