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Thermal generators' emissions constitute an externality on which a regulator might wish to impose constraints. In addition, transmission capacity for sending energy may be naturally restricted by the grid facilities. Both pollution standards and transmission capacity impose constraints, coupling the strategies of the agents in their joint strategy space. To force competitive electricity generators to respect those constraints when individual monitoring is unavailable we envisage the regulator solving a generalized Nash equilibrium problem to establish an equilibrium in which the joint constraints are satisfied. If the regulator appropriately modifies the generators' payoffs then they will play a decoupled game in which they can ignore the information on the joint constraints. For the payoff modification to induce the required behavior, a coupled constraints equilibrium needs to exist and be unique. We borrow from the electrical engineering (EE) literature a three-node network model that has these properties and use it in this paper to discuss and explain the behavior of the agents subjected to the coupled constraints. We find that the imposition of transmission and environmental restrictions may increase the output share of an inefficient generator and decrease consumer surplus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY Politicians often deplore economic agents' behaviour when they do not accept new technologies. For a new technology to be adopted, the new technology value function needs to dominate the old technology value function. If this is the case, a technology switch will occur. We characterise the value functions, without computing them, using the fact that their hypographs are viability kernels of some auxiliary control problems and study whether the graphs intersect. If they do not, the corresponding value functions do not dominate each other, and the switch cannot occur at a positive time. Using this characterisation, we analyse a technology adoption problem and show how to recognise the models, for which the switch will occur at time zero or never, without solving an optimal control problem. We conclude that the current control regime may not change if the economic agents' preferences are modelled as an integral of discounted differences between a reward from the flow variable (control) and a penalty from the stock variable (state).Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a control-theoretic aggregate model of the progression of atherosclerosis plaque, a chronic inflammatory disease of the arterial wall, to study the basic features of this disease. In the model, we exploit the role of inflammation in the disease progression, and use statins—drugs commonly recommended in atherosclerosis—to control this progression. We use a logistic function to allow for constrained growth of plaque. In the model, both the patient's age and overall health impact the plaque growth and its sensitivity to statins. The model parameters are estimated using original data, or calibrated using published research as well as our own clinical and laboratory studies. We contend that our model helps to gauge the statins' impact on a patient's plaque thickness, hence the disease's progression and cardiovascular risk, without requiring artery scans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]