We consider a simple model of a pump-assisted hydroelectric facility operating in a market with time-varying but deterministic power prices and constant water inflows. The engineering details of the facility are described by a model containing several parameters. We present an algorithm for...

Ethanol crush spreads are used to model the value of a facility which produces ethanol from corn. A real option analysis is used to investigate the effects of model parameters on the related managerial decisions of (i) how to operate the facility through optimal switching from idled to...

The "standard" Merton formulation of optimal investment and consumption involves optimizing the integrated lifetime utility of consumption, suitably discounted, together with the discounted future bequest. In this formulation the utility of consumption at any given time depends only on the...

Landsberg's notion of disorder, entropy normalized to maximum entropy, was originally proposed for the Shannon information-theoretic entropy to overcome extensivity-based deficiencies of entropy as a measure of disorder. We generalize Landsberg's concept to three classes of extended entropies:...

This paper proves an existence result for a kind of backward stochastic differential equation whose generators satisfy generalized uniformly continuous conditions in variables y and z. It is worth noting that the conditions mentioned above may not be uniform with respect to time parameter t.

In his first work on probability, written in 1711, Abraham De Moivre looked at the problem of finding the number of trials required in a binomial experiment to achieve a probability of 1/2 of finding at least some given number of successes. He looked at two cases: when the probability of...

Corn ethanol plants have been criticized for a number of reasons in recent years. This paper provides another ground for criticizing these plants. Historical corn and gasoline prices are uncorrelated, but widespread adoption of corn ethanol production might reasonably lead to future correlation...