Article
Economics
Kevin R. Williams
Summary: Airfares fluctuate due to demand shocks and intertemporal variation in willingness to pay. A model of dynamic airline pricing is used to evaluate the welfare effects, indicating that dynamic pricing benefits leisure consumers and harms business travelers. Although dynamic pricing ensures seat availability for business travelers, they are charged higher prices. Welfare is higher under dynamic pricing compared to uniform pricing at the market level, depending on the importance of demand shocks and overall demand elasticity.
Article
Economics
Marco Alderighi, Alberto A. Gaggero, Claudio A. Piga
Summary: When a firm can sell multiple units before any price adjustment takes place, three forces may affect the pricing of the inventory over time: perishability drives prices down, scarcity shifts prices up, and intertemporal price discrimination raises prices. Hidden prices arise because each unit, even if not immediately up for sale, is assigned a price. Empirical analysis of airline fares shows the existence of each force.
TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH PART B-METHODOLOGICAL
(2022)
Article
Business
Ana M. Ortega, Felipe A. Tabares
Summary: Price is a crucial factor in monetizing the value proposition of brands, and nine-ending prices are a commonly used psychological pricing strategy. However, the effects of this strategy vary depending on the context and brand type. This study validates the impact of nine-ending prices on consumer purchasing attitudes and brand revenue, finding that the effects differ based on product category, brand positioning, and preference.
JOURNAL OF RETAILING AND CONSUMER SERVICES
(2023)
Article
Operations Research & Management Science
Renato de Matta, Timothy J. Lowe
Summary: Empirical studies have shown that sellers with better customer feedback scores can charge higher prices. This study builds a system model to analyze the processes of customer arrival and reservation price formation, customer feedback collection and aggregation into a Seller Service Rating (SSR), and determining the optimal pricing strategy. It uses a simulation-optimization approach to overcome technical difficulties in finding analytical solutions.
ANNALS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Computer Science, Software Engineering
T. Gonzalez Grandon, R. Henrion, P. Perez-Aros
Summary: This paper investigates the analytical properties of dynamic probabilistic constraints, focusing on both a general multistage model and a simple two-stage model with decision rules from L-2. Basic properties such as continuity of the probability function and existence of solutions are studied, along with more specific properties like Lipschitz continuity and differentiability of the probability function. Explicit conditions and gradient formulas in the Gaussian case are provided, discussing their application in necessary optimality conditions and presenting concrete solutions.
MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING
(2022)
Article
Management
Wenchang Zhu, Huseyin Topaloglu
Summary: This study focuses on network revenue management problems with flexible products, aiming to find a policy to maximize the total expected revenue and ensure feasible route assignments for customers with purchased products. The developed policy is the first with a performance guarantee under flexible products.
M&SOM-MANUFACTURING & SERVICE OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
(2023)
Article
Computer Science, Information Systems
Seyedehmehrnaz Mireslami, Logan Rakai, Mea Wang, Behrouz Homayoun Far
Summary: The study introduces a hybrid method that allocates cloud resources based on dynamic user demands through a two-phase algorithm of reservation and dynamic provision. The algorithm minimizes total deployment cost as an optimization problem while ensuring quality of service.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CLOUD COMPUTING
(2021)
Article
Business
Graziano Abrate, Ruggero Sainaghi, Aurelio G. Mauri
Summary: The study explores the impact of professionalization level of Airbnb hosts on pricing strategies and listing performance. Findings suggest that both listing performance and price variability tend to increase with the degree of professionalization, while the effect of price variability on performance remains consistent regardless of the number of listings. Time-varying pricing is considered an important and relatively accessible strategy for hosts of all professional levels.
JOURNAL OF BUSINESS RESEARCH
(2022)
Article
Mathematics
Alessio Angius, Andras Horvath, Marcello Urgo
Summary: This paper presents a method using phase-type distributions and a Markov chain model to schedule activity networks in the face of uncertain events and incomplete information. It introduces a general formulation for efficient computation by utilizing Kronecker algebra to calculate the infinitesimal generator of the Markov chain.
Article
Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications
Shabnam Salehi, S. Hamid Mirmohammadi
Summary: This paper presents an algorithm based on stochastic dynamic programming framework for an online retailer to maximize revenue through sponsored search advertising and dynamic pricing for a perishable product over a finite horizon. The study proves properties of the optimal policy and develops an efficient algorithm to solve large-scale instances. Numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithm outperforms an optimal approach in terms of solution time. It also explores the relationship between the presented approach's run time and inventory level.
COMPUTERS & INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING
(2023)
Article
Management
Mohammad Ghuloum, Boqian Song, Goker Aydin, Gilvan C. Souza
Summary: This paper analyzes a novel dynamic pricing problem where demand and supply are both influenced by dynamic prices. It examines the impact of acquisition and selling prices on a company, and how to find the optimal strategy in terms of time and inventory.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2022)
Article
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Andrei M. Bandalouski, Natalja G. Egorova, Mikhail Y. Kovalyov, Erwin Pesch, S. Armagan Tarim
Summary: This paper introduces a novel approach to the dynamic pricing problem for hotel businesses, which includes disaggregation of demand, forecasting, elastic demand simulation, and a mathematical programming model. Experiment results show a 6% increase in hotel revenue compared to past performance with fixed pricing policy, proving its potential as a useful tool for small hotels impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
JOURNAL OF HEURISTICS
(2021)
Article
Engineering, Manufacturing
Yan Liu, Ningyuan Chen
Summary: The study suggests that for products that can be returned instantly, the optimal MBG policy is a simple threshold policy, with the threshold decreasing with inventory level. Additionally, the complexity of dynamic pricing and positive return times is analyzed, and deterministic solutions are found to be asymptotically optimal for stochastic systems.
PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
(2022)
Article
Operations Research & Management Science
Xiaohan Zhu, Xu Sun
Summary: We present and solve a robust dynamic pricing problem for an ambiguity-averse agent facing uncertain demand. Our approach, based on stochastic dynamic programming and solving a version of the Bellman-Isaacs equation, provides optimal pricing strategy and value function. The usefulness of this framework is demonstrated through special cases and a carefully designed numerical example, highlighting the value of model robustness.
NAVAL RESEARCH LOGISTICS
(2022)
Article
Management
Denis Lebedev, Paul Goulart, Kostas Margellos
Summary: This study focuses on revenue management in attended home delivery using dynamic programming. The unique fixed point of the underlying Bellman operator is proven, with a closed-form expression and continuous extension provided. Monotonicity of prices with respect to the number of orders placed is shown, offering a pathway for scalable implementations.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2021)
Article
Health Care Sciences & Services
Raha Akhavan-Tabatabaei, Diana Marcela Sanchez, Thomas G. Yeung
MEDICAL DECISION MAKING
(2017)
Article
Engineering, Civil
Carlos Sarmiento, Carlos Valencia, Raha Akhavan-Tabatabaei
JOURNAL OF WIND ENGINEERING AND INDUSTRIAL AERODYNAMICS
(2018)
Article
Management
Daniel F. Otero, Mariana Escallon, Cristina Lopez, Raha Akhavan-Tabatabaei
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2019)
Article
Operations Research & Management Science
Jorge A. Huertas, Daniel Duque, Ethel Segura-Duran, Raha Akhavan-Tabatabaei, Andres L. Medaglia
Article
Engineering, Industrial
Mohsen Varmazyar, Raha Akhavan-Tabatabaei, Nasser Salmasi, Mohammad Modarres
Article
Operations Research & Management Science
John E. Fontecha, Oscar O. Guaje, Daniel Duque, Raha Akhavan-Tabatabaei, Juan P. Rodriguez, Andres L. Medaglia
ANNALS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH
(2020)
Article
Environmental Sciences
Ivan Mura, Juan Felipe Franco, Laura Bernal, Nicolas Melo, Juan Jose Diaz, Raha Akhavan-Tabatabaei
FRONTIERS IN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
(2020)
Article
Mathematics
Malek Ebadi, Raha Akhavan-Tabatabaei
Summary: Cervical cancer screening is a critical policy, with cotesting gaining attention in public health. Personalized medical interventions are increasingly important. The study shows that the POMDP model outperforms traditional guidelines in improving quality-adjusted life years.
Article
Mathematics
Irais Mora-Ochomogo, Marco Serrato, Jaime Mora-Vargas, Raha Akhavan-Tabatabaei
Summary: Natural disasters pose a latent threat to every country in the world, with statistics showing a continuous increase in these disasters. Communities and humanitarian organizations face the challenge of better preparation and faster response to natural disasters. In some countries, in-kind donations constitute a significant portion of the support operations, presenting additional challenges.
Article
Health Policy & Services
Daniel F. Otero-Leon, Mariel S. Lavieri, Brian T. Denton, Jeremy Sussman, Rodney A. Hayward
Summary: Preventing chronic diseases is crucial in medical care. Physicians prevent chronic diseases by monitoring risk factors and prescribing necessary medication. The optimal monitoring policy depends on the patient's risk factors and demographics. This study proposes a finite horizon and finite-state Markov decision process to define monitoring policies, using stochastic models based on longitudinal observational data from electronic health records. The research investigates policies for cholesterol-lowering medication and the influence of gender and race on optimal monitoring policies.
HEALTH CARE MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Transportation Science & Technology
Ezgi Karabulut, Fatemeh Gholizadeh, Raha Akhavan-Tabatabaei
Summary: This article examines a peer-to-peer logistics system, where agents and the platform communicate bidirectionally in multiple periods. The platform aims to select a subset of requests to offer each agent, resulting in the maximum value matching for the platform. The platform utilizes the agent's choices to learn about their preferences and improve the estimated decision mechanism. Experimental findings show that a larger menu size benefits the platform's overall gain during the initial iterations when the agent's decision mechanism is not accurately estimated. However, a smaller menu size can increase the overall benefits once the estimates become more accurate through the learning process.
TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH PART C-EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
(2022)
Proceedings Paper
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Baris Bayram, Busra Ulku, Gozde Aydin, Raha Akhavan-Tabatabaei, Burcin Bozkaya
Summary: This paper uses a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) approach to predict the impact of congestion in the transportation system on delivery capacity in e-commerce. The results show that the GPR model outperforms other methods in accuracy and can be updated daily to improve prediction precision.
MACHINE LEARNING, OPTIMIZATION, AND DATA SCIENCE (LOD 2021), PT II
(2022)
Proceedings Paper
Computer Science, Theory & Methods
Merve Keskin, Raha Akhavan-Tabatabaei, Bulent Catay
2019 WINTER SIMULATION CONFERENCE (WSC)
(2019)
Article
Engineering, Multidisciplinary
M. Varmazyar, R. Akhavan-Tabatabaei, N. Salmasi, M. Modarres
Review
Management
Vinicius N. Motta, Miguel F. Anjos, Michel Gendreau
Summary: This survey presents a review of optimization approaches for the integration of demand response in power systems planning and highlights important future research directions.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
Article
Management
Philipp Schulze, Armin Scholl, Rico Walter
Summary: This paper proposes an improved branch-and-bound algorithm, R-SALSA, for solving the simple assembly line balancing problem, which performs well in balancing workloads and providing initial solutions.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
Article
Management
Roshan Mahes, Michel Mandjes, Marko Boon, Peter Taylor
Summary: This paper discusses appointment scheduling and presents a phase-type-based approach to handle variations in service times. Numerical experiments with dynamic scheduling demonstrate the benefits of rescheduling.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
Article
Management
Oleg S. Pianykh, Sebastian Perez, Chengzhao Richard Zhang
Summary: Efficient scheduling is crucial for optimizing resource allocation and system performance. This study focuses on critical utilization and efficient scheduling in discrete scheduling systems, and compares the results with classical queueing theory.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
Review
Management
Hamed Jahani, Babak Abbasi, Jiuh-Biing Sheu, Walid Klibi
Summary: Supply chain network design is a large and growing area of research. This study comprehensively surveys and analyzes articles published from 2008 to 2021 to detect and report financial perspectives in SCND models. The study also identifies research gaps and offers future research directions.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
Article
Management
Patrick Healy, Nicolas Jozefowiez, Pierre Laroche, Franc Marchetti, Sebastien Martin, Zsuzsanna Roka
Summary: The Connected Max-k-Cut Problem is an extension of the well-known Max-Cut Problem, where the objective is to partition a graph into k connected subgraphs by maximizing the cost of inter-partition edges. The researchers propose a new integer linear program and a branch-and-cut algorithm for this problem, and also use graph isomorphism to structure the instances and facilitate their resolution. Extensive computational experiments show that, if k > 2, their approach outperforms existing algorithms in terms of quality.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
Article
Management
Victor J. Espana, Juan Aparicio, Xavier Barber, Miriam Esteve
Summary: This paper introduces a new methodology based on the machine learning technique MARS for estimating production functions that satisfy classical production theory axioms. The new approach overcomes the overfitting problem of DEA through generalized cross-validation and demonstrates better performance in reducing mean squared error and bias compared to DEA and C2NLS methods.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
Article
Management
Stefano Nasini, Rabia Nessah
Summary: In this paper, the authors investigate the impact of time flexibility in job scheduling, showing that it can significantly affect operators' ability to solve the problem efficiently. They propose a new methodology based on convex quadratic programming approaches that allows for optimal solutions in large-scale instances.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
Article
Management
Zhiqiang Liao, Sheng Dai, Timo Kuosmanen
Summary: Nonparametric regression subject to convexity or concavity constraints is gaining popularity in various fields. The conventional convex regression method often suffers from overfitting and outliers. This paper proposes the convex support vector regression method to address these issues and demonstrates its advantages in prediction accuracy and robustness through numerical experiments.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
Article
Management
Kuo-Hao Chang, Ying-Zheng Wu, Wen-Ray Su, Lee-Yaw Lin
Summary: The damage and destruction caused by earthquakes necessitates the evacuation of affected populations. Simulation models, such as the Stochastic Pedestrian Cell Transmission Model (SPCTM), can be utilized to enhance disaster and evacuation management. The analysis of SPCTM provides insights for government officials to formulate effective evacuation strategies.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
Article
Management
Qinghua Wu, Mu He, Jin-Kao Hao, Yongliang Lu
Summary: This paper studies a variant of the orienteering problem known as the clustered orienteering problem. In this problem, customers are grouped into clusters and a profit is associated with each cluster, collected only when all customers in the cluster are served. The proposed evolutionary algorithm, incorporating a backbone-based crossover operator and a destroy-and-repair mutation operator, outperforms existing algorithms on benchmark instances and sets new records on some instances. It also demonstrates scalability on large instances and has shown superiority over three state-of-the-art COP algorithms. The algorithm is also successfully applied to a dynamic version of the COP considering stochastic travel time.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
Article
Management
Bjorn Bokelmann, Stefan Lessmann
Summary: Estimating treatment effects is an important task for data analysts, and uplift models provide support for efficient allocation of treatments. However, evaluating uplift models is challenging due to variance issues. This paper theoretically analyzes the variance of uplift evaluation metrics, proposes variance reduction methods based on statistical adjustment, and demonstrates their benefits on simulated and real-world data.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
Article
Management
Congzheng Liu, Wenqi Zhu
Summary: This paper proposes a feature-based non-parametric approach to minimizing the conditional value-at-risk in the newsvendor problem. The method is able to handle both linear and nonlinear profits without prior knowledge of the demand distribution. Results from numerical and real-life experiments demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the approach.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
Article
Management
Laszlo Csato
Summary: This paper compares the performance of the eigenvalue method and the row geometric mean as two weighting procedures. Through numerical experiments, it is found that the priorities derived from the two eigenvectors in the eigenvalue method do not always agree, while the row geometric mean serves as a compromise between them.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
Article
Management
Guowei Dou, Tsan-Ming Choi
Summary: This study investigates the impact of channel relationships between manufacturers on government policies and explores the effectiveness of positive incentives versus taxes in increasing social welfare. The findings suggest that competition may be more effective in improving sustainability and social welfare. Additionally, government incentives for green technology may not necessarily enhance sustainability.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
