PROFIT MAXIMIZATION AND PRICE RESPONSIVENESS AMONG GUATEMALAN CORN PRODUCERS: FINDINGS AND IMPLICATIONS

Posted price profit maximization for multicast by approximating fixed points

We describe an iterative fixed point approach for the following stochastic optimization problem: given a multicast tree and probability distributions of user utilities, find an optimal posted price mechanism i.e. compute prices to offer the users in order to maximize the expected profit of the service provider. We show that any optimum pricing is a fixed point of an efficiently computable funct...

Customer Selection and Profit Maximization

Profit Maximization and Supermodular Technology

A dataset is a list of observed factor inputs and prices for a technology; profits and production levels are unobserved. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for a dataset to be consistent with profit maximization under a monotone and concave revenue based on the notion of cyclic monotonicity. Our result implies that monotonicity and concavity cannot be tested, and that one cannot deci...

Profit maximization with bankruptcy and variable scale

In a diffusion model of an enterprise with variable scale, conditions are given for the maximization of ‘profit’ (expected total discounted withdrawals) to lead to bankruptcy almost surely. The optimal withdrawal policy is an ‘overflow policy’: the withdrawal rate is zero if the asset level is below a ‘barrier’, and equal to the maximum rate if the asset level is at least equal to the barrier. ...

Ownership Structure, Profit Maximization, and Competitive Behavior

We question the broad applicability of the assumption of profit maximization as the goal of the firm and investigate how variance in objective functions across different ownership structures affects competitive behavior. While prior work in agency theory has argued that firms may fail to engage in profit maximizing behaviors due to misalignment between the goals of owners and managers, we conte...