We revisit a service provider's problem to match supply and demand via an online appointment system such as a doctor in the health care sector. We identify in a survey that an extensive set of available appointments leads to significantly less demand because customers infer a lower quality of...

Sequences of decisions that occur under uncertainty arise in a variety of settings, including transportation, communication networks, finance, defence, etc. The classic approach to find an optimal decision policy for a sequential decision problem is dynamic programming; however its usefulness is...

A stochastic difference game is considered in which a player wants to minimize the time spent by a controlled one-dimensional symmetric random walk {𝑋𝑛,𝑛=0,1,…} in the continuation region 𝐶:={1,2,…}, and the second player seeks to maximize the survival time in C. The process...

As the energy market has grown in importance in recent decades, researchers have paid increasing attention to swing option contracts. Early studies evaluated the swing contract as if it were a financial derivative contract, by ignoring its storage constraints. Aided by recent advances in...

This paper is devoted to the development of heuristics for the dynamic pricing problem. A discrete time model of dynamic pricing on the fixed time horizon is proposed. It is applicable to products that satisfy two properties: 1) product value expires at a certain predetermined date, and 2)...