Fall 2018

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In this Issue:


Message from the Section Chair

I hope you are enjoying the fall. The INFORMS Annual Meeting is quickly approaching. I look forward to seeing many of you there. I would like to remind you about our section business meeting to be held on Monday, November 5th at 6:15 pm. The location will be confirmed by the conference organizer at a later date. Get updates and get involved!

A quick update on recent events follows.

Our annual election finished in September. I would like to especially thank Vivek Farias (MIT) for chairing the Nominating Committee. Following the usual protocol, two officers and a board member were elected. The candidates received votes from over 100 members. The elected officers and board member will be officially introduced in our business meeting.  I will also officially finish my term as section chair.  Ilan Lobel (NYU Stern) will be the incoming chair of the section.

The agenda of the business meeting is included below. I would like to thank the committee members of the two section prizes.  The Section Award committee is chaired by Omar Besbes (Columbia), and includes Rene Caldentey (Chicago) and Yossi Aviv (Tel Aviv).  The Dissertation Award committee is chaired by Hamid Nazerzadeh (USC), and includes Ozge Sahin (John’s Hopkins) and Xuanming Su (Wharton). We have received a record number of submissions to both awards and I greatly appreciate the work of the award committees. The winners of the awards will be announced during our business meeting.

RM and related research continue to make inroads in leading academic journals. With the support of the EIC at Naval Research Logistics, Ming Hu (Toronto Rotman), a new Revenue Management and Market Design department has been created. Rene Caldentey (Chicago) has taken on the role of the department editor. Rene has prepared a message to introduce the newly created area, which is included below. Please support the new area by submitting your work there.

The board has continued to look for ways to broaden our reach and increase our impact in the informs community. In order to maintain a strong position, we need to continue to increase our membership and reach out to the broader revenue management and pricing community. We identified two groups that we should particularly focus on. The first group is undergraduate and graduate students that are interested in revenue management and pricing. The second group is RMP professionals. To encourage the participation of students in our section, the board decided to waive membership fees for all student members. The section is in a strong financial position, and we expect this fee change has minimal impact on section finances. Please encourage your students to join our section! To reach out to RMP professionals, we need to disseminate section activities more broadly and make the latest research accessible to practitioners of RMP tools and techniques. The board believes that social media is an effective way to do just that. Sophia Huang (Vistex) has recently taken on the role of social media coordinator for our section and will work to increase our visibility on different social media platforms. Please support her work with ideas and blubs about your own research and activities. Sophia can be reached at sophia.huang@vistex.com.

The RMP cluster at the annual informs meeting has a record-breaking 69 sessions and 249 talks. I would like to take this opportunity to thank this year’s cluster chairs, Stefanus Jasin (Michigan Ross), Srikanth Jagabathula (NYU Stern/Harvard), and Nicolas Stiers (Facebook), for the exceptional job organizing it. The cluster sponsored by our section at the annual meeting is one of the most visible section activities to the general informs community. We are looking for volunteers to organize the cluster for INFORMS 2019 Annual conference.  Please let us know if you can contribute to this very important task.

Again, I would like to remind you to attend our business meeting at informs on Monday at 6:15 pm. The business meeting will start with a wine and cheese reception, and should provide enough of a break from the excitement and imposition of the conference.

 

See you in Phoenix!

Dan Zhang

Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder

Email: dan.zhang@colorado.edu; Voice: (303) 492 2340

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NRL Launches New Department on Revenue Management and Market Design

The Naval Research Logistics (NRL) journal has launched a new department on Revenue Management and Market Design (RMMD) that seeks to publish papers at the forefront of advancing the theory and practice of Revenue Management and Dynamic Pricing (RMDP) and its linkage to the growing areas of marketplace innovation and the sharing economy.

Revenue Management and Dynamic Pricing is a multidisciplinary research area that has had a transforming impact on a growing number of industries such as transportation (airlines, railway, rental car), hospitality (hotels, cruise lines, casinos) and retail (apparel, consumer goods). The rise of online marketplaces and Internet exchanges is rapidly expanding the scope and possibilities of RMDP to a broader range of applications including media and Internet advertising, sharing economy markets, labor and procurement platforms, healthcare exchanges, to name a few. However, these application areas pose a new set of challenges that traditional RMDP methods cannot fully address. The introduction of the RMMD department at NRL is a response to this need for cutting-edge research in these emerging areas.

The RMMD department is committed to publishing and disseminating the best articles that provide original theoretical results and advance the state-of-the-art of the models and methods used to solve real problems. RMMD particularly welcomes papers that explore emerging issues in the field and the connection between traditional RMDP problems and marketplace design and analytics.

Associate editors: Victor Araman (AUB), Ozan Candogan (U. Chicago), Pavithra Harsha (IBM), Stefanus Jasin (U. Michigan).

NRL is a premier journal devoted to publishing high-quality papers in operations research/management and general quantitative modeling. Founded in 1954, it has a distinguished history of publishing both seminal methodological contributions and innovative applications (see a list of NRL papers by Nobel laureates such as Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth at here). Starting 2018, NRL strives to achieve an average turn-around time of 60 days and no more than 90 days.

Sincerely,

René Caldentey (Department Editor, RMMD, Naval Research Logistics)

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Annual INFORMS RMP Section Business Meeting

The time of the INFORMS Annual Conference is also the time for the Section’s main annual business meeting. There will be some formal procedures to cover and follow-up reports on the topics from the half-time update (provided at the open Board meeting during the June RMP conference in Toronto). This year the business meeting will take place on Monday, November 5th at 6:15 pm at Phoenix Convention Center, 100 Level-North building, room 130

The meeting will be preceded by a wine and cheese reception. Here are the main agenda points:

  • State of the Section report
    • General
    • Finances
    • Membership
  • Award presentations
  • Introduction of the new officers of the Board
  • Message from journal editors
  • Other Business:
    • Changes to the RMP Policies and Procedures Manual
    • Discussion

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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 at: 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 at: here.

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