Main description:

Dynamic optimization is rocket science - and more. This volume teaches researchers and students alike to harness the modern theory of dynamic optimization to solve practical problems. These problems not only cover those in space flight, but also in emerging social applications such as the control of drugs, corruption, and terror. This volume is designed to be a lively introduction to the mathematics and a bridge to these hot topics in the economics of crime for current scholars. The authors celebrate Pontryagin's Maximum Principle - that crowning intellectual achievement of human understanding. The rich theory explored here is complemented by numerical methods available through a companion web site.

Contents:

Background.- Continuous-Time Dynamical Systems.- Applied Optimal Control.- Tour d'Horizon: Optimal Control.- The Path to Deeper Insight: From Lagrange to Pontryagin.- Multiple Equilibria, Points of Indifference, and Thresholds.- Advanced Topics.- Higher-Dimensional Models.- Numerical Methods for Discounted Systems of Infinite Horizon.- Extensions of the Maximum Principle.- Appendices.- Mathematical Background.- Derivations and Proofs of Technical Results.