In this paper, we review pricing of the variable annuity living and death guarantees offered to retail investors in many countries. Investors purchase these products to take advantage of market growth and protect savings. We present pricing of these products via an optimal stochastic control...

In this paper we provide a complete theoretical analysis of a two-dimensional degenerate non convex singular stochastic control problem. The optimisation is motivated by a storage-consumption model in an electricity market, and features a stochastic real-valued spot price modelled by Brownian...

This paper studies an optimal irreversible extraction problem of an exhaustible commodity in presence of regime shifts. A company extracts a natural resource from a reserve with finite capacity, and sells it in the market at a spot price that evolves according to a Brownian motion with...

Consider the problem of a government that wants to control its debt-to-GDP (gross domestic product) ratio, while taking into consideration the evolution of the inflation rate of the country. The uncontrolled inflation rate follows an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck dynamics and affects the growth rate of the...

In this paper we establish a new connection between a class of 2-player nonzerosum games of optimal stopping and certain 2-player nonzero-sum games of singular control. We show that whenever a Nash equilibrium in the game of stopping is attained by hitting times at two separate boundaries, then...

A problem of optimally purchasing electricity at a real-valued spot price (that is, with potentially negative cost) has been recently addressed in De Angelis, Ferrari and Moriarty (2015) [SIAM J. Control Optim. 53(3)]. This problem can be considered one of irreversible investment with a cost...

This note gives a brief, non-rigorous sketch of basic optimal control theory, which is a useful tool in several simple economic problems,such as those in resource and environmental economics. While the mathematical analysis in the note is self-contained, there is not much explanation and...