Structure of approximate solutions for discrete-time control systems arising in economic dynamics Original Research Article

In this work we study the structure of approximate solutions of an autonomous discrete-time control system with a compact metric space of states XX which is a subset of a finite-dimensional Euclidean space. This control system is described by a nonempty closed set Ω⊂X×XΩ⊂X×X which determines a class of admissible trajectories (programs) and by a bounded upper semicontinuous function v:Ω→R1v:Ω→R1 which determines an optimality criterion. We are interested in turnpike properties of the approximate solutions which are independent of the length of the interval, for all sufficiently large intervals. Usually, in economic dynamics, the turnpike properties have been studied for systems such that all their good programs converge to a turnpike which was an interior point of ΩΩ. In this paper we establish turnpike results for a large class of control systems for which the turnpike is not necessarily an interior point of ΩΩ.