Using a stochastic dynamic programming model we analyze how French private forest owners make inter-temporal trade-offs between non-timber amenities and timber income. We explicitly take into account the price expectations and forest growth. In addition, unlike previous empirical studies...

Appointments in primary care are of two types: 1) prescheduled appointments, which are booked in advance of a given workday; and 2) same-day appointments, which are booked as calls come during the workday. The challenge for practices is to provide preferred time slots for prescheduled...

We use a stochastic dynamic framework to compare price collars (price ceilings and floors) in a cap-and-trade system with uncertainty in the level of baseline emissions and costs. We consider soft collars, which provide limited volume of additional emission allowances (a reserve) at the price...

This paper deals with the coordination of manufacturing, remanufacturing and returns acceptance control in a hybrid production-inventory system. We use a queuing control framework, where manufacturing and remanufacturing are modelled by single servers with exponentially distributed processing...

A production system consisting of two parallel machines with production-dependent failure rates is investigated in this paper. The machines produce one type of final product and unmet demand is backlogged. The objective of the system is to find a productivity policy for both machines that will...

In this paper, we study the optimal dynamic asset allocation strategy for the ELA scheme of DC pension plan during the distribution phase. In an ELA scheme of DC pension plan, the assets are invested in equities and bonds, and are distributed to the plan participants by an actuarial method. The...

Both in business to business and in consumer markets direct mailings are an important means of communication with individual customers. This paper studies the mailing frequency problem that addresses the issue of how often to send a mailing to an individual customer in order to establish a...

Analyses of global climate policy as a sequential decision under uncertainty have been severely restricted by dimensionality and computational burdens. Therefore, they have limited the number of decision stages, discrete actions, or number and type of uncertainties considered. In particular, two...

The management of introduced species that are both invasive and commercially valuable is contentious. While such species provide substantial economic benefits to some, they pose considerable costs to others due to negative impacts on ecosystems. We propose a decision framework to help balance...

In this paper, we investigate an optimal reinsurance and investment problem for an insurer whose surplus process is approximated by a drifted Brownian motion. Proportional reinsurance is to hedge the risk of insurance. Interest rate risk and inflation risk are considered. We suppose that the...