This paper studies the welfare consequences of a vertical merger that raises rivals costs when downstream competition is à la Cournot between firms with constant asymmetric marginal costs. The main result is that such a vertical merger can nevertheless improve welfare if it involves a...

The second part of the thesis focuses on a different stochastic problem of finding the optimal hedging points in a manufacturing flow control system. Our simulation-based method allows solving large scale systems that are considered very difficult to solve by current standards in the literature.