Many sellers allow consumers to pay with reward points instead of cash or credit card. While the revenue implications of cash and credit card purchases are transparent, the implications of reward sales are not trivial, especially when a firm that issues points is not a seller. In this case, a...

We consider a sequential decision problem involving shared resources and signals in which a decision maker repeatedly observes some exogenous information (the signal), modeled as a finite-state Markov process, then allocates a limited amount of a shared resource across a set of projects. The...

We study a firm's optimal investment timing and capacity decisions in the presence of uncertain time-to-build. Because of the time-to-build, the firm can expand its capacity before or after the initial project is completed and the lags of the follow-up investment can be shorter than those of the...

This paper presents a framework for understanding the limits that exist in optimal policy design in dynamic contexts. We consider the design of policies in the context of dynamic linear models. Fundamental design limits exist for policy rules in such environments in the sense that any policy...

We examine whether unregulated, private insurance markets efficiently provide insurance against reclassification risk (the risk of becoming a bad risk and facing higher premiums). To do so, we examine the ex-post risk type of individuals who drop their long-term care insurance contracts relative...

Driven by increased complexity of dynamical systems, the solution of system of differential equations through numerical simulation in optimization problems has become computationally expensive. This paper provides a smart data driven mechanism to construct low dimensional surrogate models. These...

Using a multi-stage stochastic programming method, we suggest an optimal liability-driven investment(LDI) strategy for a closed defined-benefit pension fund including real assets. The objective is to jointly optimize contribution, funding ratio, and buyout cost, subject to a constraint on...

We study the inferences about labor adjustment costs obtained by the 'gap methodology' of Caballero and Engel [1993] and Caballero, Engel and Haltiwanger [1997]. In that approach, the policy function of a manufacturing plant is assumed to depend on the gap between a target and the current level...