Winter 2019

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In this Issue:


Message from the Section Chair

Dear Revenue Management & Pricing Section,

 

I’d like to start by thanking the RMP community for giving me the opportunity to serve as the RMP Section Chair for this year. I’d also like to thank our outgoing officers and board members, Gustavo Vulcano, Pavithra Harsha, and Maarten Oosten, for their service to the RMP Section. I thank also Dan Zhang, the past chair of the section, for the work he did last year for the community. This newsletter contains an address from Dan on the state of the RMP Section. I also extend my welcome to our new section officers and board members. Ming Hu was elected our new section’s vice-chair and next year’s chair, Ozge Sahin was voted our new treasurer and Stefanus Jasin was chosen by the community as our newest board member, where he joins Kalyan Talluri. I also extend our appreciation to Sami Najafi, Yao Cui, and Sophia Huang for continuing to serve the RMP Section as webmaster, newsletter editor, and social media coordinator respectively.

 

2018 was a great year for the RMP Section. The two flagship journals of our community, Management Science and Operations Research, created new departments to handle papers on Revenue Management and Market Analytics, with Kalyan Talluri and Gabriel Weintraub serving as department editors at the former and Ramesh Johari and Gustavo Vulcano serving as area editors at the latter. Both departments are doing well, having received over 50 submissions each in their first year. The journal Naval Research Logistics has recently also embarked on a similar path, starting a department on Revenue Management and Marketplace Design, with Rene Caldentey at the helm. The health of these departments is very important for the future of our research community, and we encourage all RMP authors to strongly consider sending their work to them.

 

For authors who submit papers to the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, there is a new option available in 2019 to forward the conference reviews to journals for potentially faster evaluation. This option can be used to forward reviews to the Revenue Management and Market Analytics departments of Management Science and Operations Research, as well as to other journals including Mathematics of Operations Research.

 

Last year was also a very successful one for our section conference and our cluster within the INFORMS Annual Meeting. The RMP Conference was held in Toronto and beautifully organized by the Queen’s University crew of Yuri Levin, Mikhail Nediak, Anton Ovchinnikov. It was very well attended, with over a hundred talks and two hundred participants. The RMP Cluster at the INFORMS Annual Meeting was put together by Srikanth Jagabathula, Stefanus Jasin and Nicolas Stier-Moses and included a record-breaking 249 talks. Thank you to all who have worked on putting together RMP Section events.

 

This year, the RMP Conference will take place at Stanford University on June 6 and 7, and the team putting it together is composed of Kostas Bimpikis, Yonatan Gur, Dan Iancu, and Daniela Saban. As was the case multiple times over the last few years, the event will be collocated with the Marketplace Innovation Workshop, which will be organized by Itai Ashlagi, Ramesh Johari, Costis Maglaras, Gabriel Weintraub and myself, and will take place on June 4 and 5. The 2019 RMP Conference will be offering two different kinds of submissions this year. Papers can be submitted as extended abstracts, as in prior years, or as full papers. Submissions accepted as full papers will be spotlighted at the RMP Conference, with a longer time slot and the invitation of a discussant, in a way that is similar to some of the MSOM SIG Conferences. The deadline for submitting full papers is February 18. For submission of extended abstracts to either the RMP Conference or the Marketplace Innovation Workshop, the deadline is March 1.

 

We are also well underway in our preparations for the INFORMS International Conference, to be held in Cancun on June 9-12, and for the INFORMS Annual Meeting, to be held in Seattle on October 20-23. Jacob Feldman and Joline Uichanco are serving as the RMP cluster co-chairs for the International Meeting, and Maxime Cohen, Arnoud den Boer and Daniela Saban are serving as the RMP cluster co-chairs for the Annual Meeting. If you would like to serve as a session chair in one of these events, please reach out to one of the cluster co-chairs.

 

Next year’s RMP Conference will be held at Johns Hopkins University, with the tentative dates being June 4 and 5, 2020. The organizers will be Goker Aydin, Ozge Sahin, and Ruxian Wang. We will soon invite bids for the location of the 2021 RMP Conference. If you would like to host it, please start putting together your proposal in the near future.

 

Our section is in a healthy financial situation, with over 85 thousand dollars in our account. Therefore, we decided to no longer charge students for section membership. If you are a student interested in our research area, or if you advise such students, please encourage them to become section members!

 

At the 2018 INFORMS Annual Meeting, we also celebrated several award winners. The Section Prize, which celebrates the best contribution to the science of pricing and revenue management published in English, was awarded to Stefanus Jasin for his paper on “Re-Optimization and Self-Adjusting Price Control for Network Revenue Management,” which was published in Operations Research in 2014. The award committee was composed of Omar Besbes (chair), Yossi Aviv and Rene Caldentey.

 

The Dissertation Prize, which celebrates the best doctoral dissertation in the field of pricing and revenue management written in English, was awarded to Antoine Desir for his thesis on “Fundamental Tradeoffs for Modeling Customer Preferences in Revenue Management.” Antoine graduated from Columbia University, where he was advised by Vineet Goyal. The committee also awarded 3 honorable mentions: Anna Papush (advised by Georgia Perakis), Rad Niazadeh (advised by Robert Kleinberg) and Yun Zhou (advised by Ming Hu). The Dissertation Prize committee was composed of Hamid Nazerzadeh (chair), Ozge Sahin and Xuanming Su. Thank you to all of the award committee members, and a big congratulations to the award winners!

 

For 2019 onwards, the RMP Section board voted to replace the Dissertation Award with a Student Paper Award. This will allow us to celebrate students’ accomplishments before they go on the job market, rather than after they graduate. We also voted to add a Service Award for work done on behalf of the RMP Section and our community more broadly. This award will alternate with the biennial Practice Award. Since in 2019 we will be awarding a Practice Award, the first Service Award will be given out in 2020.

 

I look forward to working with you as the RMP Section Chair for the year. If you have any suggestions or questions, please feel free to reach out to me.

 

Ilan Lobel

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Annual State of the Section Address

The section continues to be in a strong position:

  • Our summer conference in Toronto is a great success. The conference was attended by 219 people and featured 28 sessions and 107 talks. In addition, there were three plenary sessions and practical problem sessions. The conference was preceded by the Fourth Marketplace Innovation Workshop.
  • We have a record-breaking number of sessions and talks at INFORMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix. In total, there were 69 sessions and 249 talks. In comparison, we had 59 sessions in 2017 and 47 sessions in 2016.
  • Our business meeting at INFORMS Annual Meeting was well attended.
  • The section is in strong financial position with a cash balance of $85k, a $10k increase from the same time last year.
  • The Section Prize/Dissertation Award committees received record numbers of submissions. The practice prize was skipped in 2018 but will come back in 2019 with a higher cash award of $2000 (compared with $1000 before).
  • The new RMMA area in Operations Research/Management Science received a large number of high quality
  • We started a new RMMD area in Naval Research Logistics in the summer.
  • As of 10/30/2018, the number of section members was 380.
  • The board received multiple proposals to host the section conference in 2019 and 2020. The 2019 and 2020 section conferences will be hosted by Stanford and Johns Hopkin, respectively.

 

These achievements are impossible without the continuous and hard work of many of our colleagues and the support of the RMP community. In particular, I would like to thank the following colleagues (I know I probably missed someone):

  • RMP Section 2017-2018 board: Ilan Lobel (NYU), Gustavo Vulcano (UTDT), Pavithra Harsha (IBM), Maarten Oosten (Vistex), and Kalyan Talluri (Imperial College)
  • Yuri Levin, Mikhail Nediak, Anton Ovchinnikov at Queen’s University and members of the organizing committee for the section conference in Toronto
  • The organizing committee of the Marketplace Innovation Workshop: Ramesh Johari (Stanford), Ilan Lobel (NYU), Costis Maglaras (Columbia), and Gabriel Weintraub (Stanford)
  • RMP track co-organizers at INFORMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix: Srikanth Jagabathula (Harvard/NYU), Stefanus Jasin (Michigan), and Nicolas Stiers (Facebook)
  • 2018 Dissertation Award Committee: Hamid Nazerzadeh (Chair, USC), Ozge Sahin (Johns Hopkins), and Xuanming Su (Wharton)
  • 2018 Section Prize Committee: Omar Besbes (Chair, Columbia), Yossi Aviv (Tel Aviv), Rene Caldentey (Chicago)
  • Editorial board of the RMMA area at Operations Research led by Ramesh Johari (Stanford) and Gustavo Vulcano (UTDT)
  • Editorial board of the RMMA area at Management Science led by Kalyan Talluri (Imperial College) and Gabriel Weintraub (Stanford)
  • Editorial board of the RMMD area at Naval Research Logistics led by Rene Caldentey (Chicago).
  • Ming Hu (Toronto), EIC at Naval Research Logistics and Section Chair-Elect for supporting the creation of the RMMD area at the journal.

 

According to our bylaws, three members of the RMP Section board are renewed on an annual basis. In 2018, we had a full slate of candidates for the three elected positions. The nominating committee was chaired by Vivek Farias (MIT). I would like to thank Vivek and the candidates who stepped forward: Omar Besbes (Columbia), Gonzalo Romero (U. Toronto), and Srikanth Jagabathula (NYU/Harvard). And congratulations to the winners:

  • Vice Chair/Chair-Elect: Ming Hu (U. Toronto)
  • Secretary/Treasurer: Ozge Sahin (Johns Hopkins)
  • Board Member: Stefanus Jasin (U. Michigan)


I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the officers and board members who have stepped down: Gustavo Vulcano (UTDT), Pavithra Harsha (IBM), and Maarten Oosten (Vistex). 

 

In the past two years, the board has been preparing the society status application within INFORMS. In order to have a high chance of a successful application, it is important to reach the critical membership threshold of 500 (our current membership is around 380). The board has recently decided to make the student membership of the section free, effective January 1, 2019. If you know a student working in RMP related areas, please encourage him/her to join the section.

 

I would also like to thank volunteers who devoted their time to the section. After years of serving as the newsletter editor, Anton Ovchinnikov (Queen’s), has passed the baton to Yao Cui (Cornell). In addition, Sophia Huang (Vistex) recently started her role as the social media coordinator. Our web editor Sami Najafi (Santa Clara) has worked with Yao to convert the newsletter to a more approachable web-based format. A big thank you to Anton and to the 2017-2018 team:


The board has also been looking for ways to better connect with the general RMP community, which is far larger than the membership of the section. Please reach out to the section board regarding this matter if you have a suggestion. Our LinkedIn group has over 1000 members, far exceeding the current section membership count. Sophia Huang has been creating LinkedIn updates based on section activities. So far, this content is mainly based on the section newsletter released each quarter. If you have an update that is of potential interest to our members and the general RMP community, please contact Sophia at sophia.huang@vistex.com for inclusion in her social media updates.

 

Ilan Lobel (NYU) is the new chair of the section. All the best to him and to the section! I look forward to your continued support and I hope to see you at one of our upcoming events!

 

Dan Zhang

University of Colorado Boulder

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Upcoming Conferences

2019 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Conference

June 6-7, 2019

Stanford Graduate School of Business

 

The 19th Annual INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing (RMP) Section Conference will be hosted by the Stanford Graduate School of Business, on Thursday, June 6, 2019, and Friday, June 7, 2019. Conference co-chairs are Kostas Bimpikis, Yonatan Gur, Dan Iancu, and Daniela Saban. Full paper submission deadline is February 18, 2019. Extended abstract submission deadline is March 1, 2019. The conference will be preceded by the Marketplace Innovation Workshop on June 4-5, 2019. More information can be found Here

 

Other Related Conferences

 

–    2019 INFORMS Business Analytics Conference

  •  April 14-16, 2019, Austin, TX

–    POMS 29th Annual Conference

  • May 2-6, 2019, Washington, DC
  • RMP track co-chairs:

                 

–    2019 INFORMS International Conference

 

–    2019 MOM Conference & SIG Meeting

  • June 30-July 2, 2019, National University of Singapore, Singapore

 

–    30th European Conference on Operations Research

  • June 23-26, 2019, Dublin, Ireland

 

 
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RMP Section – How to Join

To become a member of the Revenue Management and Pricing Section, it is the easiest (but not necessary) just to add it to the regular INFORMS membership. Those who’d rather focus exclusively on the Section’s activities can become members only of the Section by calling 1-800-446-3676. More information can be found HERE.



Benefits of Membership

As a member of the Section, you will receive benefits such as our newsletter, registration fee discount to annual section conference, 50% off the subscription rate to the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management, and listserver announcements. More information can be found HERE.



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