We consider the multi-period pricing problem of a service firm facing time-varying capacity levels. Customers are assumed to be fully strategic with respect to their purchasing decisions, and heterogeneous with respect to their valuations, and arrival-departure periods. The firm's objective is...

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...

We solve the problem of a social planner who seeks to minimize inequality via transfers with a fixed public budget in a distribution of exogenously given incomes. The appropriate solution method depends on the objective function: If it is convex, as in the case of the absolute mean deviation, it...

The linear-quadratic (LQ) optimization is a close to standard technique in the optimal control framework. LQ is very well researched and there are many extensions for more sophisticated scenarios like nonlinear models. Usually, the quadratic objective function is taken as a prerequisite for...

Increasing renewable generation results in growing supply uncertainty. By now hydrostorages are the most efficient way of smoothing uncertain power supply. In liberalized and competitive markets the valuation of hydro storages investment projects needs to take the market information and...

Policy makers constantly face optimal control problems: what controls allow to achieve certain targets in, e.g., GDP growth or inflation? Conventionally this is done by applying certain linear-quadratic optimization algorithms to dynamic econometric models. Several algorithms extend this...

This paper aims to represent wage bargaining as an optimal control problem. Specifically, by assuming that employment follows a stock adjustment principle towards the level that maximises profits, i.e., towards labour demand, we build an intertemporal optimising model in which the real wage is...

In linear-quadratic control (LQC) problems with singular control cost matrix and/or singular transition matrix, we derive a reduction of the dimension of the Riccati matrix, simplifying iteration and solution. Employing a novel transformation, we show that, under a certain rank condition, the...

We study the optimal control of a pollutant that accumulates with a delay.We find that optimal paths are, in general, non-monotonic and oscillatory, but monotonic if the objective function is additively separable. Hence, using additively separable objective functions as an approximation to a...

This paper aims to represent wage bargaining as an optimal control problem. Specifically, by assuming that employment follows a stock adjustment principle towards the level that maximises profits, i.e., towards labour demand, we build an intertemporal optimising model in which the real wage is...