Optimal Spacing of “Covered” and “Exposed” Time Intervals in a Stochastic Process with High Penalty Costs: Applications to Parking and Insurance

This paper studies a class of policies for a stochastic process that is constituted of several time intervals of total time T. The intervals can be covered (or insured) at a pay-per-use rate or exposed (uninsured) with the risk of a large penalty. A decision maker has the three options: (i) Pay the user fee for the full period, (ii) not pay at all, and (iii) sporadically pay a user fee leaving an uncovered period at the end of each covered one. …