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...

We study general dynamic programming problems with continuous and discrete choices and general constraints. The value functions may have kinks arising (1) at indifference points between discrete choices and (2) at constraint boundaries. Nevertheless, we establish a general envelope theorem:...

A divide and conquer algorithm for exploiting policy function monotonicity is proposed and analyzed. To solve a discrete problem with n states and n choices, the algorithm requires at most nlog2(n)+5n objective function evaluations. In contrast, existing methods for nonconcave problems require...