Increases in car ownership and usage have resulted in serious traffic congestion problems in many large cities worldwide. Innovative travel modes and services can play an important role in improving the efficiency and sustainability of transportation systems. In this study, we evaluate the...

The emergence of less restricted fare structures in the airline industry reduced the capability of airlines to segment demand through restrictions such as Saturday night minimum stay, advance purchase, non-refundability, and cancellation fees. As a result, new forecasting techniques such as...

This thesis is motivated by the desire to estimate air traffic delays at airports under a range of assumptions about the predictability of (a) inter-arrival times of demands (arrivals and departures) and (b) service times of aircraft movements (landings and takeoffs). It consists of two main...

This thesis studies optimal stopping problems for strategic agents in the context of two economic applications: experimentation in a competitive market and information exchange in social networks. The economic agents (firms in the first application, individuals in the second) take actions, whose...

After reviewing prevalent approaches to the modeling pandemic influenza transmission, we present a simple distributional model that captures the most significant population attributes that alter the dynamics of the outbreak. We describe how diversities in activity, susceptibility and infectivity...

In a multi-product market, if one product stocks out, consumers may substitute to competing products. In this thesis, we use an axiomatic approach to characterize a price-dependent demand substitution rule, and provide a sufficient and necessary condition for demand models where our demand...

Efficient allocation of scarce resources in networks is an important problem worldwide. In this thesis, we focus on resource allocation problems in a network of congested airports. The increasing demand for access to the world's major commercial airports combined with the limited operational...

In this thesis, we investigate the batch sizing problem for a custom-job production facility. More specifically, given a production system that has been assigned several different types of custom jobs, we try to derive batching policies to minimize the expected total time that a job spends in...

In this thesis we study three problems related to financial modeling. First, we study the problem of pricing Employee Stock Options (ESOs) from the point of view of the issuing company. Since an employee cannot trade or eectively hedge ESOs, she exercises them to maximize a subjective criterion...

Annual influenza outbreaks incur great expenses in both human and monetary terms, and billions of dollars are being allocated for influenza pandemic preparedness in an attempt to avert even greater potential losses. Vaccination is a primary weapon for fighting influenza outbreaks. The influenza...