In this research note, we investigate segmentation opportunities for social planners such as government agencies, nonprofits, and public organizations. These opportunities arise when the potential products are vertically (quality) differentiated and the consumers are heterogeneous in their preferences toward quality. In these cases, whether to offer quality differentiated products and what qual...

Two control laws, to control the liquid pressure of an agricultural spray boom are presented and compared. Characteristic for the process is a dead zone and a time varying delay. The first control law is rather intuitive and is based on direct dead zone compensation and a pole placement idea. The other control law originates from sliding mode control where the continuous part of the control con...

The purpose of this note is to provide an existence result for the solution of fully coupled Forward Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (FBSDEs) of the mean field type. These equations occur in the study of mean field games and the optimal control of dynamics of the McKean Vlasov type.

In this paper the authors study a model for the optimal operation of a bank or insurance company which was recently introduced by Peura and Keppo. The model generalizes a previous one of Milne and Robertson by allowing the bank to raise capital as well as to pay out dividends. Optimal operation of the bank is determined by solving an optimal control problem. In this paper it is shown that the s...

A maximum principle in the form given by R.V. Gamkrelidze is obtained, although without a priori regularity assumptions to be satisfied by the optimal trajectory. After its formulation and proof, we propose various regularity concepts that guarantee, in one sense or another, the nondegeneracy of the maximum principle. Finally, we show how the already known first-order necessary conditions can b...