Information delays exist in an inventory system when it takes time to collect, process, validate, and transmit inventory/demand data. A general framework is developed in this paper to describe information flows in an inventory system with information delays. We characterize the suffcient...

In this paper, we revisit and clarify the celebrated machine maintenance and sale age model of Kamien and Schwartz (KS) involving a machine subject to failure. KS formulate and solve the problem as a deterministic optimal control problem with the probability of the machine failure as the state...

We develop a general methodology for a partially observed stochastic control problem. The dynamics is governed by a discrete-time Markov process. We describe an application to an inventory system with possibility of shrinkage, and introduce unnormalized conditional probabilities to transform the...

We develop a general filtering framework for the problem of estimating the state of a system whose dynamics is governed by a discrete-time Markov process. We describe applications to inventory control systems with partial observations. We introduce conditional distributions and unnormalized...

The theory of investment and growth of firms has been an important source of stochastic control problems in economics and management science. The issue of optimal management contract under the constraint that a CEO can depart to pursue an outside option ("managerial limited commitment") has been...