It is standard practice in economic evaluation and in any economic analysis of future events to assume the discounted utility model on the part of economic agents. This paper compares the discounted utility model with three hyperbolic discounting models with respect to private and social ®nancial bene®ts. The discounting models are ®tted using non-linear regression techniques to data collected ...

This paper deals with constrained optimization of Markov Decision Processes. Both objective function and constraints are sums of standard discounted rewards, but each with a diierent discount factor. Such models arise, e.g. in production and in applications involving multiple time scales. We prove that if a feasible policy exists, then there exists an optimal policy which is (i) stationary (non...

background: chronic infection with hepatitis c virus (hcv) is increasingly recognized as a major global health problem. illicit injection drug use is an important risk factor for the rising hepatitis c virus (hcv) prevalence in ir iran. objectives: the objective of this study was to determine the long-term effectiveness (total quality adjusted life years (qalys) gained) of methadone maintenance...

In this paper, we consider some non-standard renewal risk models with some dependent claim sizes and stochastic return, where an insurance company is allowed to invest her/his wealth in financial assets, and the price process of the investment portfolio is described as a geometric Lévy process. When the claim-size distribution belongs to some classes of heavy-tailed distributions and a constrai...