This paper presents a utility function model of donors who need to determine their donation to a charity organization that structures and publishes donations by tiers. By considering the prestige associated with each tier level, our analysis suggests that a tiered scheme generates an incentive...

We investigate the cost of the opportunity delayed by working on one project with uncertain success rather than searching for a new project. We answer the question: how long should a firm work on a research project with uncertain success before abandoning it if the only alternative is to search...

We consider a cloud provider which hosts interactive applications such as mobile apps and online games. Depending on the traffic of users for an application, the provider commits a subset of its resources (hardware capacity) to serve the application. The provider must choose a dynamic pricing...

An individual is repeatedly offered the opportunity to invest in a risky asset whose return distribution is unknown. Because the return distribution is constant over time, however, he is able to learn about that distribution by observing investment outcomes. Results are presented regarding the...

We examine a game-theoretic model of a two-firm R&D race in which expenditures on R&D and the concomitant increase in experience/learning enable the firms to increase their probability of discovering an invention. The learning process is stochastic. It generates a unique subgame-perfect...

This paper introduces a Bayesian decision theoretic model of optimal production in the presence of learning-curve uncertainty. The well-known learning-curve model is extended to allow for random variation in the learning process with uncertainty regarding some parameter of the variation. A...

We analyze a decision problem with repeated gambles and find that under some seemingly reasonable risk-averse utility functions, recommended behavior for the initial decision can be highly risk-taking and counterintuitive. Further analysis reveals that the derived utility function for the return...