We propose an optimal control problem to model the dynamics of the communication activity of a firm with the aim of maximizing its efficiency. We assume that the advertising effort undertaken by the firm contributes to increase the firm's goodwill and that the goodwill affects the firm's sales....

This paper tackles the problem of the presence of negative average rates of returns in the evaluation of the performance of mutual funds using a DEA approach. We present some extensions of DEA models for the evaluation of the performance of mutual funds that enable to compute the performance...

In this work we analyze the effects of credit contagion on the credit quality of a portfolio of bank loans issued to SMEs. To this aim we start from the discrete time model proposed in Barro and Basso (2005), that considers the counterparty risk generated by the business relations in a network...

This paper studies the continuous double auction from the point of view of market engineering: we tweak a resampling rule often used for this exchange protocol and search for an improved design. We assume zero intelligence trading as a lower bound for more robust behavioral rules and look at...

In Europe, when an imbalance between demand and capacity is detected for air traffic network resources, Air Traffic Flow Management slots are allocated to flights on the basis of a First Planned First Served principle. We propose a market mechanism to allocate such slots in the case of a single...

We develop a technique that provides a lower bound on the speed of transient random walk in a random environment on regular trees. A refinement of this technique yields upper bounds on the first regeneration level and regeneration time. In particular, a lower and upper bound on the covariance in...

This contribution deals with options on assets which pay discrete dividends. We analyze some methodologies to extract information on dividends from observable option prices. Implied dividends can be computed using a modified version of the well known put-call parity relationship. This technique...

Segmentation is a core strategy in modern marketing and age-specific segmentation, which is based on the age of the consumers, is very common in practice. A characteristic of age-specific segmentation is the change of the segments composition during time, which may be studied only using dynamic...

In this contribution we consider a dynamic portfolio optimization problem where the manager has to deal with the presence of minimum guarantee requirements on the performance of the portfolio. We briefly discuss different possibilities for the formulation of the problem and present a quite...

In this contribution, we study options on assets which pay discrete dividends. We focus on American options, as when dealing with equities, most traded options are of American-type. In particular, we analyze implied volatilities in the model proposed by Haug et al. [12] and in the binomial...