Actions on Environment under uncertainty: stochastic formulation and the associated deterministic problem

Abstract

An application of the results of this paper proves that there is not always an economic benefit when destroying the environment for planting an alternative industrial project. Our criterion, to act, to delay or to deny the industrial investment over the environment, is given in terms of the free boundary associated to a deterministic degenerate obstacle problem (on in unbounded domain) associated to the stochastic optimal control problem formulated, initially, in terms of some suitable stochastic diffusion processes. The localizing estimates on the free boundary are obtained through a suitable spatial change of variables and by working with a suitable distance associated to the coefficient of the elliptic operator.