This paper determines the optimal timing of dike heightenings as well as the corresponding optimal dike heightenings to protect against floods. To derive the optimal policy we design an algorithm based on the Impulse Control Maximum Principle. In this way the paper presents one of the first real...

We study the optimal design of a queueing system when agents' arrival and servicing are governed by a general Markov process. The designer of the system chooses entry and exit rules for agents, their service priority---or queueing discipline---as well as their information, while ensuring that...

It is evident that linear programming model remains the most potent mathematical tool for the efficient allocation of scarce operational resources of an organization. Whilst projecting the graphical method as the easiest solution approach to linear programming where only two constraining factors...

Expected consumer's surplus rarely represents preferences over price lotteries. Still, I give sufficient conditions for policies which maximize aggregate expected surplus to be interim Pareto Optimal. Besides two standard partial equilibrium conditions, I assume that feasible prices satisfy a...

In ordinal (probabilistic) assignment problems, each agent reports his preference rankings over objects and receives a lottery defined over those objects. A common efficiency notion, sd-efficiency, is obtained by extending the preference rankings to preferences over lotteries by means of...

We allocate objects to agents as exemplified primarily by school choice. Welfare judgments of the object-allocating agency are encoded as edge weights in the acceptability graph. The welfare of an allocation is the sum of its edge weights. We introduce the constrained welfare-maximizing...

Markets for natural resources and commodities are often oligopolistic. In these markets, production capacities are key for strategic interaction between the oligopolists. We analyze how different market structures influence oligopolistic capacity investments and thereby affect supply, prices and...

The paper develops a version of Pontryagin's maximum principle for optimal control problems with monotonicity constraints on control variables. Whereas the literature handles such constraints by imposing an assumption of piecewise smoothness on the control variable and treating the slope of this...

The utopia point of a multicriteria optimization problem is the vector that specifies for each criterion the most favourable among the feasible values. The Euclidean compromise solution in multicriteria optimization is a solution concept that assigns to a feasible set the alternative with...

This paper highlights connections between the discrete and continuous approaches to optimal auction design with single and multi-dimensional types. We provide an interpretaion of an optimal auction design problem in terms of a linear program that is an instance of a parametric shortest path...