Due to the accelerating demographic change of the population the reform of the existing pension systems constitutes one of the greatest political challenges in most European countries.

A theoretical discussion of different pension reforms must incorporate not only the demographic aspect but also the role of financial market risk and the impact on production and employment.

These notes develop a dynamic macroeconomic model which incorporates these aspects within a flexible theoretical framework. The proposed approach provides a large scale population model and features a...

In a globalized economy logistics has become a crucial area for the success of companies. The performance of each company depends on the performance of its suppliers and of its business partners. The customers of each company are spread on a large geographical space. For this reason distribution logistics is the most important and complex part of logistics. An efficient and effective management of distribution logistics is a key issue for the success of a company. There are many different problems to deal with, from facility location to transportation, to inventory management, and, most...

Production planning problems containing special characteristics from process industries are addressed in this book. The main subject is the development of mathematical programming models that allow to model production plans which are not disrupted by discretization of time. However, discrete time models are used as a basis and are subsequently enhanced to include aspects of time continuity. Their integration is achieved by different building blocks which may be combined freely according to the specific planning situation at hand. The primary area of application of these kinds of models are...

This book investigates convex multistage stochastic programs whose objective and constraint functions exhibit a generalized nonconvex dependence on the random parameters. Although the classical Jensen and Edmundson-Madansky type bounds or their extensions are generally not available for such problems, tight bounds can systematically be constructed under mild regularity conditions. A distinct primal-dual symmetry property is revealed when the proposed bounding method is applied to linear stochastic programs. Exemplary applications are studied to assess the performance of the theoretical...

From the complexity of the foreign exchange market and related decision problems, the author derives the necessity to use tools from machine learning and artificial intelligence, and to combine such methods with sophisticated financial modeling techniques.

Most developed economics show the tendency of an increasing importance of modern services such as tourism, logistical services, finance, and others. In many cases, complex optimization problems can be found in this context, and the successful operation of modern services often depends on the ability to solve the obtained optimization models. Metaheuristics on the other hand present an interesting problem-resolution paradigm that has attracted considerable interest in past years. The book combines a set of selected and peer-reviewed articles, presenting novel results of metaheuristics for...

This book describes a laboratory experiment designed to test the causes and properties of bubbles in financial markets and explores the question whether it is possible to design markets which avoid such bubbles and crashes. In the experiment, subjects were given the opportunity to trade in a stock market modeled after the seminal work of Smith et al. (1988). To account for the increasing importance of online betting sites, subjects were also allowed to trade in a digital option market. The outcomes shed new light on how subjects form and update their expectations, placing special emphasis...