A methodology for the conceptual design phase risk assessment of an aerospace system was proposed. The method was designed to examine political, social, and economic risk over a systems lifecycle through the use of future scenarios to bound uncertainty. A decision support framework was developed...

Often in the early stages of the engineering design process, a decision maker lacks the information needed to represent uncertainty in the input parameters of a performance model. In one particular form of severely deficient information, a nominal estimate is available for an input parameter,...

We propose a framework for estimation and inference when the model may be misspecified. We rely on a local asymptotic approach where the degree of misspecification is indexed by the sample size. We construct estimators whose mean squared error is minimax in a neighborhood of the reference model,...

We study contracting when both principal and agent have to exert noncontractible effort for production to take place. An analyst is uncertain about what actions are available and evaluates a contract by the expected payoffs it guarantees to each party in spite of the surrounding uncertainty....

The India Mark II/III hand pump system is now over 40 years old and has become a staple in how water is retrieved in many rural areas across India and Africa. With over 4 million installations, it is estimated that 10% of the world's population is using one on a daily basis. One of the...

We develop a theory of optimal stopping problems under ambiguity in continuous time. Using results from (backward) stochastic calculus, we characterize the value function as the smallest (nonlinear) supermartingale dominating the payoff process. For Markovian models, we derive an adjusted...