Deciding who should receive a mail-order catalog is among the most important decisions that mail-order-catalog firms must address. In practice, the current approach to the problem is invariably myopic: firms send catalogs to customers who they think are most likely to order from that catalog. In...

This paper considers a class of one dimensional calculus of variations problems with monotonicity and comonotonicity constraints arising in economic and financial models where law invariant concave criteria (or law invariant convex measures of risk) are used. Existence solutions, optimality...

This paper extends models of renewable resources to an economy with two sectors, resource extraction and production. In contrast to one sector models, we show that the optimal strategies in the single-firm model are essentially different from those in the two-player model. In the single-player...

A dynamic model is developed to analyze farmers' irrigation investment and crop choice decisions under alternative water quality protection policies. The model is applied to an empirical example in the Oklahoma High Plains. The choices of crops and irrigation systems and the resulting levels of...

This paper studies energy conversion technology adoption in the electricity supply sector from the perspective of irreversible investments under uncertainty, and with a particular interest in environmental sustainability. We develop a dynamic technology adoption model that is firmly rooted in...

A central focus in the study of lek evolution is to understand the clustering of male mating territories. Lekking males typically defend small clumped territories and experience intense competition associated with dense aggregations. We used dynamic state variable modeling to evaluate three...

We study here optimal management of dynamic ecological systemsthat exhibit a destabilizing positive feedback. The prototypeexample is that of a shallow lake in which phosphorous loadingplaced by anthropogenic activities (fertilizers for farmingand gardening) is stored in sediments until a...

We analyse how progressive taxation and education subsidies affect schooling deci- sions when the returns to education are stochastic. We use the theory of real options to solve the problem of education choice in a dynamic, life-cycle consistent, stochastic model. We show that education...

We propose a model of food allocation in an economy in which property rights exist in human beings. We assume that a slave-owner allocates food over the slave's lifetime so as to maximise his own wealth. The slave's productive capacity is determined endogenously by food consumption. Food...