Investopedia contributors come from a range of backgrounds, and over 25 years there have been thousands of expert writers and editors who have contributed. In economics, demand is the consumer's ...

Utility is the fundamental variable thought to underlie economic choices. In particular, utility functions are believed to reflect preferences toward risk, a key decision variable in many real-life ...

This paper considers a stochastic shortest path problem where the arc lengths are independent random variables following a normal distribution. In this problem, the optimal path is one that maximizes ...