Optimal Control Of Age Structured Populations In Economy Demography And The Environment

This book covers a wide range of topics within mathematical modelling and the optimization of economic, demographic, technological and environmental phenomena. Each chapter is written by experts in their field and represents new advances in modelling theory and practice. These essays are exemplary of the fruitful interaction between theory and practice when exploring global and local changes. The unifying theme of the book is the use of mathematical models and optimization methods to describe age-structured populations in economy, demography, technological change, and the environment. Emphasis is placed on deterministic dynamic models that take age or size structures, delay effects, and non-standard decision variables into account. In addition, the contributions deal with the age structure of assets, resources, and populations under study. Interdisciplinary modelling has enormous potential for discovering new insights in global and regional development. Optimal Control of Age-structured Populations in Economy, Demography, and the Environment is a rich and excellent source of information on state-of-the-art modelling expertise and references. The book provides the necessary mathematical background for readers from different areas, such as applied sciences, management sciences and operations research, which helps guide the development of practical models. As well as this the book also surveys the current practice in applied modelling and looks at new research areas for a general mathematical audience. This book will be of interest primarily to researchers, postgraduate students, as well as a wider scientific community, including those focussing on the subjects of applied mathematics, environmental sciences, economics, demography, management, and operations research.

This new 4th edition offers an introduction to optimal control theory and its diverse applications in management science and economics. It introduces students to the concept of the maximum principle in continuous (as well as discrete) time by combining dynamic programming and Kuhn-Tucker theory. While some mathematical background is needed, the emphasis of the book is not on mathematical rigor, but on modeling realistic situations encountered in business and economics. It applies optimal control theory to the functional areas of management including finance, production and marketing, as well as the economics of growth and of natural resources. In addition, it features material on stochastic Nash and Stackelberg differential games and an adverse selection model in the principal-agent framework. Exercises are included in each chapter, while the answers to selected exercises help deepen readers’ understanding of the material covered. Also included are appendices of supplementary material on the solution of differential equations, the calculus of variations and its ties to the maximum principle, and special topics including the Kalman filter, certainty equivalence, singular control, a global saddle point theorem, Sethi-Skiba points, and distributed parameter systems. Optimal control methods are used to determine optimal ways to control a dynamic system. The theoretical work in this field serves as the foundation for the book, in which the author applies it to business management problems developed from his own research and classroom instruction. The new edition has been refined and updated, making it a valuable resource for graduate courses on applied optimal control theory, but also for financial and industrial engineers, economists, and operational researchers interested in applying dynamic optimization in their fields.

This book is a tribute to Professor Laurent Praly and follows on from a workshop celebrating the occasion of his 60th birthday. It presents new and unified visions of the numerous problems that Laurent Praly has worked on in his prolific career: adaptive control, output feedback and observers, stability and stabilization. His main contributions are the central topic of this book. The book collects contributions written by prominent international experts in the control community, addressing a rich variety of topics: emerging ideas, advanced applications, and theoretical concepts. Organized in three sections, the first section covers the field of adaptive control, where Laurent Praly started his career. The second section focuses on stabilization and output feedback, which is also the topic of the second half of his career. Lastly, the third section presents the emerging research that will form Laurent Praly’s scientific legacy.

This book constitutes refereed proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mathematical Optimization Theory and Operations Research, MOTOR 2020, held in Novosibirsk, Russia, in July 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online. The 25 full papers and 8 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 102 submissions. The papers in the volume are organised according to the following topical headings: ​combinatorial optimization; mathematical programming; global optimization; game theory and mathematical economics; heuristics and metaheuristics; machine learning and data analysis.

Industrial production and consumption patterns rely heavily on the intensive use of both renewable and non-renewable resources and the consequences for the environment can be serious. Following a long period of time where the profit incentives of firms have prevailed over preservation of the environment and the world’s natural resources, a new consensus has emerged concerning the need to regulate firm behaviour, aimed at ensuring the sustainability of the economic system in the long run. This book offers an exhaustive overview of current economic debate about these topics, taking modern oligopoly theory as a benchmark. The first part of the book covers static models dealing with incentives for green research and development, Pigovian taxation, cartels, environmental quality and international trade, as well as the role of corporate social responsibility, public firms and consumer environmental awareness as endogenous regulatory instruments. Then, the author moves on to examine the role of time while drawing from optimal control and differential game theory. This opens the way to the discussion of fair discount rates to ensure the welfare of future generations, as well as the long run sustainability of production and consumption patterns.

The purpose of this collection of essays is to shed some light on the complex relationship between environmental quality and the distribution of income. Are the preferences of the poor towards a cleaner environment really different from those of the rich? Environmental economists have traditionally focused on efficiency issues. In their analyses the quality of the environment is usually related to aggregate or average variables, like per capita income; policy recommendations are usually formulated considering efficiency with no regard for equity and also the predicted effects of policies are evaluated in aggregate terms. The essays collected in this volume go into the problem of the relationship between environmental quality and income distribution. The book’s opening essay shows how different theories of economic growth and environmental quality seem to suggest that the higher the level of income the higher is the value of environmental protection. The essays that follow, a mix of already published papers and of papers solicited for this book, analyse the relationship between environmental quality and income distribution from different perspectives (both micro and macro) and on the basis of more than one methodology. This book highlights that the preferences of the poor towards a cleaner environment may differ from those of the rich, but income is also very likely to represent only one factor affecting them. The essays consider other relevant factors affecting preferences for environmental quality. What clearly emerges is that the distribution of costs and benefits of environmental policies is the key for their successful implementation, and that further research is needed to both address the distributional effects themselves and the strategies to mitigate them.

The existence of environmental dilemmas and political conflicts leads us to appreciate the need for individuals and groups to behave strategically in order to achieve their goals and maintain their wellbeing. Global issues such as climate change, resource depletion, and pollution, as well as revolts and protests against corporations, regimes, and other central authorities, are the result of increased levels of externalities among individuals and nations. These all require policy intervention at international and global levels. This book includes chapters by experts proposing game theoretical solutions and applying experimental design to a variety of social issues related to global and international conflicts over natural resources and the environment. The focus of the book is on applications that have policy implications, relevance and, consequently, could lead to the establishment of policy dialogue. The chapters in the book address issues that are global in nature, such as international environmental agreements over climate change, international water management, common pool resources, public goods, international fisheries, international trade, and collective action, protest, and revolt. The book’s main objective is to illustrate the usefulness of game theory and experimental economics in policy making at multiple levels and for various aspects related to global and international issues. The subject area of this book is already widely taught and researched, but it continues to gain popularity, given growing recognition that the environment and natural resources have become more strategic in human behavior.

The monetary valuation of environmental goods and services has evolved from a fringe field of study in the late 1970s and early 1980s to a primary focus of environmental economists over the past decade. Despite its rapid growth, practitioners of valuation techniques often find themselves defending their practices to both users of the results of applied studies and, perhaps more troubling, to other practitioners. One of the more heated threads of this internal debate over valuation techniques revolves around the types of data to use in performing a valuation study. In the infant years of the development of valuation techniques, two schools of thought emerged: the revealed preference school and the stated preference school, the latter of which is perhaps most associated with the contingent valuation method. In the midst of this debate an exciting new approach to non-market valuation was developed in the 1990s: a combination and joint estimation of revealed preference and stated preference data. There are two primary objectives for this book. One objective is to fill a gap in the nonmarket valuation "primer" literature. A number of books have appeared over the past decade that develop the theory and methods of nonmarket valuation but each takes an individual nonmarket valuation method approach. This book considers each of these valuation methods in combination with another method. These relationships can be exploited econometrically to obtain more valid and reliable estimates of willingness-to-pay relative to the individual methods. The second objective is to showcase recent and novel applications of data combination and joint estimation via a set of original, state-of-the-art studies that are contributed by leading researchers in the field. This book will be accessible to economists and consultants working in business or government, as well as an invaluable resource for researchers and students alike.