Mediator proposals can accelerate agreement and increase welfare even if the mediator is entirely uninformed. We demonstrate this by adding random mediation to the Cramton (1992) bargaining model. Mediation increases welfare by pooling types, which reduces signaling costs. When mediation is...

Dynamic optimization offers a great potential for maximizing performance of continuous processes from startup to shutdown by obtaining optimal trajectories for the control variables. However, numerical procedures for dynamic optimization can become prohibitively costly upon a sufficiently fine...

A deterministic global optimization method is developed for a class of discontinuous functions. McCormick’s method to obtain relaxations of nonconvex functions is extended to discontinuous factorable functions by representing a discontinuity with a step function. The properties of the...

In continuous branch-and-bound algorithms, a very large number of boxes near global minima may be visited prior to termination. This so-called cluster problem (J Glob Optim 5(3):253–265, <CitationRef CitationID="CR4">1994</CitationRef>) is revisited and a new analysis is presented. Previous results are confirmed, which state that at...</citationref>

A new method is described for computing nonlinear convex and concave relaxations of the solutions of parametric ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Such relaxations enable deterministic global optimization algorithms to be applied to problems with ODEs embedded, which arise in a wide variety...