The incentive to copy software depends on the publisher’s price and monitoring strategy. This paper analyzes how a publisher’s strategy depends on the penalty for copyright violation. It shows that changes in price and monitoring have qualitatively different effects on potential users. Both affect users’ choice between copying and buying. Only monitoring reduces the expected benefit of those wh...

We model a risk-averse newsvendor’s decision-making behavior with some commonly used classes of utility functions within the expected utility theory (EUT) framework. Under fairly general conditions of EUT, we show that a risk-averse newsvendor will order less than an arbitrarily small quantity as selling price gets larger if price is higher than a threshold value, i.e., the optimal order quanti...

Our objective is to determine if a first-price auction or a posted-price market provides a seller with the larger expected revenue when buyers have a common value for the item being sold. An agent-based, posted-price market and an agent-based, first-price common-value auction with a reserve price are developed to compare these selling methods. When the seller cannot impose a reserve price in th...

We use recent developments on threshold autoregressive models that allow deriving endogenously threshold effects to analyse the evolution of the US stock price–dividend relation over the period 1871 to 2004. More specifically, a mean-reverting dynamic behaviour of the stock price–dividend ratio should be expected once such threshold is reached. Our empirical results showed that significant adju...

We derive optimal portfolio weights for an investor who has specific beliefs regarding the distribution of a stock price at a future time. For example, a fundamental investor will want to take advantage of the information his analysis provides when constructing a portfolio. In this regard, we examine the optimal weights for models in which the investor believes that there is a range in which th...

In a Dutch auction, the price of an item decreases incrementally from the starting price at regular intervals. A bidder may buy the item at any time and stop the auction at the current price. This paper presents an optimal price decrement strategy in a Dutch auction, such that the expected revenue of the auction host is maximized. Properties of the optimal solution and a simple iterative soluti...

This paper formulates and solves the problem of a homeowner who wants to sell their house for the maximum possible price net of transactions costs (including real estate commissions). The optimal selling strategy consists of an initial list price with subsequent weekly decisions on how much to adjust the list price until the home is sold or withdrawn from the market. The solution also yields a ...

Abstract The price to rent ratio can be used identify properties which are either overvalued or undervalued according market fundamentals. Fluctuations in the over time, traced changes expectations of future house growth (expected returns) rental growth. In this paper, we measure impact these latent variables Scotland’s main cities by implementing a state-space model based on present value. est...