If civil war is a contest for popular support, why would a government ever embark on a policy of disproportionate force and mass killing? The logic of civilian defection expects such an approach to easily backfire, as civilians respond to massive losses by opposing the side that inflicted them....

Use of optimization models in science and policy applications is often problematic because the best available models are very inaccurate representations of the originating problems. Such is the case with electoral redistricting models, for which there exist no generally accepted measures of...

Many questions of interest in economics can be stated in terms of monotone comparative statics: If a parameter of a constrained optimization problem increases, when does its solution increase as well. This paper characterizes monotone comparative statics in different directions in...

Purpose: We aim to generalize the continuous-time principal-agent problem to incorporate time-inconsistent utility functions, such as those of mean-variance type, which are prevalent in risk management and finance. Design/methodology/approach: We use recent advancements of the Pontryagin maximum...

Markets for natural resources and commodities are often oligopolistic. In these markets, production capacities are key for strategic interaction between the oligopolists. We analyze how different market structures influence oligopolistic capacity investments and thereby affect supply, prices and...

We study a robust monopoly pricing problem with a minimax regret objective, where a seller endeavors to sell multiple goods to a single buyer, only knowing that the buyer's values for the goods range over a rectangular uncertainty set. We interpret this pricing problem as a zero-sum game between...

In this study, we develop a static signaling game model to examine the problem of a firm raising funds externally to finance an investment project when there is an information asymmetry between the firm and its outside investors, and the life-span of the investment project is very short....

The main result of this paper is that, in continuous time games with imperfect monitoring it is better to average information over time rather than respond at every instant. The two main reasons why it is better to introduce delayed response to signals are that it helps to (1) loosen...

We characterize x-directional monotone comparative statics in function spaces, generalizing the results in Barthel and Sabarwal (2018) for finite-dimensional Euclidean spaces, and showing that their proofs generalize to infinite-dimensional spaces. Our generalizations include those for...

Present market instabilities have prompted great interest on the characteristics of specific portfolios such as minimum variance and equally- weighted risk contribution portfolios as these portfolios do not rely on the estimate of expected returns. Indeed, in turmoil periods traditional market...