An important issue any organization or individual has to face when managing data containing sensitive information, is the risk that can be incurred when releasing such data. Even though data may be sanitized before being released, it is still possible for an adversary to reconstruct the original...

This half-semester course discusses decision theory and topics in game theory. We present models of individual decision-making under certainty and uncertainty. Topics include preference orderings, expected utility, risk, stochastic dominance, supermodularity, monotone comparative statics,...

Effiziente Reduktion des Produktionsrisikos im Ackerbau durch Ertragsversicherungen In Europa werden staatliche Hilfen für Ertragsversicherungen nach dem Vorbild der USA oder Kanada gefordert. In dieser Arbeit werden daher zum einen Bedingungen erarbeitet, unter denen die Subventionierung von...

Some extension economists and others often recommend profit margin hedging in choosing thetiming of crop sales. This paper determines producer’s utility function and price processeswhere profit margin hedging is optimal. Profit margin hedging is shown to be an optimalstrategy under a highly...

The typical model of retail pricing for produce products assumes retailers set price equal to the farm price plus a certain markup. However, observations from scanner data indicate a large degree of price dispersion in the grocery retailing market. In addition to markup pricing behavior, we...

In this paper, we propose a framework for robust optimization that relaxes the standard notion of robustness by allowing the decision maker to vary the protection level in a smooth way across the uncertainty set. We apply our approach to the problem of maximizing the expected value of a payoff...

This paper studies the evolutionary stability of the unique Nash equilibrium of a first price sealed bid auction. It is shown that the Nash equilibrium is not asymptotically stable under payoff monotonic dynamics for arbitrary initial populations. In contrast, when the initial population...

Classical auction theory relies heavily on the assumption of perfectly rational bidders that play according to their Nash Equilibrium Strategies. An alternative model is developed in this Thesis. It develops a framework for analyzing evolutionary learning in repeated auctions - bidders'...

Because sequential auctions have permeated society more than ever, it is desirable for participants to have the optimal strategies beforehand. However, finding closed-form solutions to various sequential auction games is challenging. Current literature provides some answers for specific cases...