We consider the optimal sequential irreversible investment policy of a value maximizing firm facing decreasing returns to scale and interest rate uncertainty. We characterize the optimal accumulation policy and its value for a broad class of interest rate models by focusing on the marginal investment decision and deriving the marginal value of capital. We also state a set of conditions under wh...

An agricultural policy option where individual producers’ support prices increase with the proportion of land set-aside is evaluated. A theoretical framework is presented and a stochastic simulation model is developed to generate estimates of the impacts of the policy on aggregate and regional distribution of government payments and farm-level income. Results indicate that significant land idli...

Implicit methods for Hamilton Jacobi Bellman (HJB) partial differential equations give rise to highly nonlinear discretized algebraic equations. The classic policy iteration approach may not be efficient in many circumstances. In this article, we derive sufficient conditions to ensure convergence of a combined fixed point-policy iteration scheme for solution of the discretized equations. Numeri...

BACKGROUND The Ministry of Health in Malawi is implementing a pragmatic and innovative approach for the management of all HIV-infected pregnant women, termed Option B+, which consists of providing life-long antiretroviral treatment, regardless of their CD4 count or clinical stage. Our objective was to determine if Option B+ represents a cost-effective option. METHODS A decision model simulate...

BACKGROUND To support policy making, we developed an initial model to assess the cost-effectiveness of potential strategies to increase influenza vaccination rates among children in China. METHODS We studied on children aged 6 months to 14 years in four provinces (Shandong, Henan, Hunan, and Sichuan), with a health care system perspective. We used data from 2005/6 to 2010/11, excluding 2009/1...

In standard models of experimentation, the costs of project development consist of (i) the direct cost of running trials as well as (ii) the implicit opportunity cost of leaving alternative projects idle. Another natural type of experimentation cost, the cost of holding on to the option of developing a currently inactive project, has not been studied. In a (multi-armed bandit) model of experime...

The online bin packing problem is a well-known bin packing variant which requires immediate decisions to be made for the placement of a sequence of arriving items of various sizes one at a time into fixed capacity bins without any overflow. The overall goal is maximising the average bin fullness. We investigate a ‘policy matrix’ representation which assigns a score for each decision option inde...

Title of Dissertation: COST MATTERS: APPLICATION AND ADVANCEMENT OF ECONOMIC METHODS TO INFORM POLICY CHOICE IN CRIMINOLOGY David M. Bierie, Doctor of Philosophy, 2007 Dissertation directed by: Professor Doris L. MacKenzie Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice This project develops and applies a cost-benefit analytic framework to evaluate a specific policy option facing the state of Ma...

We propose a unified syntactic-semantic account of passive sentences and sentences with an unspecified object (John read). For both constructions, we employ option types for introducing implicit arguments into the syntactic-semantic categorial mechanism. We show the advantages of this approach over previous proposals in the domains of scope and unaccusatives. Unlike pure syntactic treatments, o...

The online bin packing problem is a well-known bin packing variant which requires immediate decisions to be made for the placement of a lengthy sequence of arriving items of various sizes one at a time into fixed capacity bins without any overflow. The overall goal is maximising the average bin fullness. We investigate a ‘policy matrix’ representation which assigns a score for each decision opt...