讲座简介: | The Covid-19 pandemic has put in the forefront the need to balance the health benefits and the economic costs when it comes to imposing constraints on business activity. A tricky aspect of the problem is that opening up business has an immediate positive effect in the economic metrics, but a delayed and lingering negative effect on the health costs. We formulate a continuous objective function to capture this tricky aspect, and find conditions under which these two components become exchangeable. We obtain closed-form solutions of the optimal control policy. The structural solutions rule out many sub-optimal decisions, while at the same time offering a rich variety of solutions depending on parameters. |