The profitability of power plant investments depends strongly on uncertain fuel and carbon prices. In this doctoral thesis, we combine fundamental electricity market models with stochastic dynamic programming to evaluate power plant investments under uncertainty. The application of...

Does consumer behavior exhibit time inconsistency? This is an essential, yet difficult question to answer. This dissertation attempts to answer this question based on a large-scale randomized experiment in the credit card market. Specifically,we apply both time consistent preferences...

There are hundreds of thousands of crude oil and natural gas wells across North America that are currently not producing oil or gas. Many of these wells have not been permanently decommissioned to meet environmental standards for permanent closure, but are in an inactive state that enables them...

We consider an extension of the classical secretary problem where a decision maker observes only the relative ranks of a sequence of up to N applicants, whose true values are i.i.d. U[0,1] random variables. Applicants arrive according to a homogeneous Poisson Process, and the decision maker...

Chapter 1: Capacity and Utilization Choice in the US Oil Refining IndustryThis paper presents a new dynamic model of the operating and investmentdecisions of US oil refiners. The model enables me to predict how shocks to crudeoil prices and refinery shutdowns (e.g., in response to hurricanes)...

We extend economic analysis of the nuclear power industry by developing and employing three tools. They are 1) compilation and unification of operating and accounting data sets for plants and sites, 2) an abstract industry model with major economic agents and features, and 3) a model of nuclear...

In the framework of the intertemporal asset allocation problem, this dissertation focuses on the modelling of inflation risk and its impact on intertemporal asset allocation strategies. The contributions of this dissertation to the current literature are as follows.First, in considering...

This thesis studies the interaction between new and used durable goods without physical depreciation. In product categories such as CDs/DVDs and video games, the competition from used goods markets has been viewed as a serious problem by producers. These products physically depreciate...