Introduction

Abstract

In the Introduction to their seminal 1986 book on Optimal Control Feichtinger and Hartl paraphrase Joseph Schumpeter’s famous quote that dealing with capitalist economies without taking into account dynamics is like Hamlet without the prince of Denmark. A similar statement certainly applies also to the analysis of firm behavior. Dynamic aspects are of crucial importance for almost any area of managerial decision making. Firms are exposed to changing market environments and technological landscapes and can actively influence these developments among others through marketing activities or by investing in the development of product innovations or of new technologies. On an operational level firms face challenging dynamic planning problems when designing their production processes, supply chains and distribution logistics. All these different dynamic challenges gave rise to highly active areas of research, but there are very few scholars who have been able to make contributions to research on managerial decision making in several of these operational and strategic domains. Richard F. Hartl is one of them. His highly influential research covers domains ranging from daily operational challenges like Vehicle Routing and Scheduling (e.g. Bullnheimer et al. 1999a; Kovacs et al. 2015) to dynamic advertising strategies (e.g. Feichtinger et al. 1994) and strategic decisions of firms like those concerning capital investments in different technologies (e.g. Feichtinger et al. 2006).