In the monthly ifo Business Survey around 9,000 German companies answer questions about their current business situation, expectations and plans for the near future as well as on other business variables. This paper provides an overview of all regular questions (monthly, quarterly, bi-annually,...

The use of "Big Data" to explain fluctuations in the broader economy or guide the business decisions of a firm is now so commonplace that in some instances it has even begun to rival more traditional government statistics and business analytics. Big data sources can very often provide advantages...

One of the central issues in online planning is to incorporate forecast information in real time decision making. This often leads to intractable dynamic programming problems. In this work, we study a general class of online planning problems with concave objective functions and global...