Article history: Received 5 June 2008 Received in revised form 5 December 2008 Accepted 8 December 2008 Available online xxxx MSC: 65N30 76E25 76W05

According to Amnesty International's most recent death penalty report, "The Death Penalty Worldwide: Developments in 2005," four nations accounted for 94% of the 2,148 recorded executions carried out around the world in 2005, Those four nations are China 1(1,770), Iran (94), Saudi Arabia (86), and the United States (60). That is to say, China executes more people every year than the rest of the...

In this paper, installment options on the underlying asset which evolves according to Black-Scholes model and pays constant dividend to its owner will be considered. Applying arbitrage pricing theory, the non-homogeneous parabolic partial differential equation governing the value of installment option is derived. Then, penalty method is used to value the European continuous installment call opt...

A new and universal penalty method is introduced in this contribution. It is especially intended to be applied in stochastic metaheuristics like genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization or ant colony optimization. The novelty of this method is, that it is an advanced approach that only requires one parameter to be tuned. Moreover this parameter, named oracle, is easy and intuitive to han...

Classical penalty methods solve a sequence of unconstrained problems that put greater and greater stress on meeting the constraints. In the limit as the penalty constant tends to ∞, one recovers the constrained solution. In the exact penalty method, squared penalties are replaced by absolute value penalties, and the solution is recovered for a finite value of the penalty constant. In practice, ...