We study the design of pricing mechanisms and auctions when the mechanism designer does not know the distribution of buyers’ values. Instead the mechanism designer receives a set of samples from this distribution and his goal is to use the sample to design a pricing mechanism or auction with high expected profit. We provide generalization guarantees which bound the difference between average pr...

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. ...

This paper addresses the problem of profit maximization of a power plant by utilizing three different fuel systems in an optimal manner. Pontryagin’s maximum principle is used to derive properties of the optimal control strategy. These properties give rise to a switching function. Subsequently, certain heuristics are introduced and used in combination with discrete optimization to obtain an ini...

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...

Despite the enormous commercial importance of on-line advertisements (ads), there has been little work done to clarify the basis for ranking and displaying them. Most existing methods rank ads as if the user views each of them in isolation. We will consider a more realistic user model that induces three mutual influences between displayed ads: (i) positional bias (for viewing ads placed higher ...

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