The disastrous events of 2011—an earthquake and a nuclear accident, a major accounting scandal at a well-known company, and an unusual current account deficit—have brought Japan back into the international news. Although China and other countries in Asia have grown faster and gained greater...

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 this article we present both a theoretical framework and a solved example for pricing an European gas storage facility and computing the optimal strategy for its operation. As a representative price index we choose the Dutch TTF day-ahead gas price. We present statistical evidence that the...

This paper analyzes popular time-nonseparable utility functions that describe "habit formation" consumer preferences comparing current consumption with the time averaged past consumption of the same individual and "catching up with the Joneses" (CuJ) models comparing individual consumption with...

A fundamental hypothesis of quantitative finance is that stock price variations are independent and can be modeled using Brownian motion. In recent years, it was proposed to use rescaled range analysis and its characteristic value, the Hurst exponent, to test for independence in financial time...