The article discusses consumption as a social process that is a part of social provisioning and is in an evolutionary interplay with other social processes. The discussion is grounded in, but is not limited to the contributions of Thorstein Veblen. The first section delineates social...

We develop a new approach for pricing both continuous-time and discrete-time American options which is based on the fact that any American option is equivalent to a European one with a consumption process involved. This approach admits the construction of an upper bound (a lower bound) on the...

Here we develop an approach for efficient pricing discrete-time American and Bermudan options which employs the fact that such options are equivalent to the European ones with a consumption, combined with analysis of the market model over a small number of steps ahead. This approach allows...

We study the problem of assigning a set of objects to a set of agents, when each agent receives one object and has strict preferences over the objects. In the absence of monetary transfers, we focus on the probabilistic rules, which take the ordinal preferences as input. We characterize the...

In many industries, managers face the problem of selling a given stock of items by a deadline. We investigate the problem of dynamically pricing such inventories when demand is price sensitive and stochastic and the firm’s objective is to maximize expected revenues. Examples that fit this...

The main result of the paper is a stability theorem for the Snell envelope under convergence in distribution of the underlying processes: more precisely, we prove that if a sequence $(X^n)$ of stochastic processes converges in distribution for the Skorokhod topology to a process $X$ and...

In many industries, managers face the problem of selling a given stock of items by a deadline. We investigate the problem of dynamically pricing such inventories when demand is price sensitive and stochastic and the firm’s objective is to maximize expected revenues. Examples that fit this...