Consider a decision maker who has to choose one of several alternatives, and who is imperfectly informed about the payoff of each of them. In each period, the decision maker has to decide whether to stop and take one of the alternatives, or to continue researching the alternatives. New...

This paper uses an equilibrium matching framework to study jointly the optimal private provision of severance pay and the allocational and welfare consequences of government intervention in excess of private arrangements. Firms insure risk-averse workers by means of simple explicit employment...

A model of employer advertised vacancies for labor is presented. The model's predictions are consistent with a variety of results reported by applied studies of the durations of different types of vacancies, and with the advertising strategies used by employers. The optimal advertising policy is...

In this paper we study Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems with the restriction that at decision epochs only a finite number of given Markovian decision rules may be applied. The elements of the finite set of allowed decision rules should be mixed to improve the performance. The set of...

In facility layout problems, a major concern is the optimal design or remodeling of the facilities of an organization. The decision maker's objective is to arrange the facility in an optimal way, so that the interaction among functions (i.e. machines, inventories, persons) and places (i.e....