In This Issue:
Message from the Section Chair
Dear Revenue Management & Pricing Section,
I would like to start by thanking all of you for giving me the opportunity to serve as chair of the RMP Section for the year 2022. It is a great honour to serve this community.
Despite all the challenges of past two years, our RMP Section is in great shape due to the effort of our previous chair, Rene Caldentey, and I would like to give him a really big thank-you for all his work. I also would like to thank our outgoing officers and board members, Ming Hu (past chair), Daniela Saban (board member) and Ruxian Wang (treasurer/secretary), for their service and welcome our new members: Omar Besbes (chair-elect), Yao Cui (treasurer/secretary) and Hamsa Bastani (board member). I am also grateful to George Chen for accepting our invitation to serve as the newsletter editor, Sophia Huang, and Sami Najafi for continuing to serve the RMP Section as social media coordinator and webmaster, respectively.
In the remainder of this newsletter you will find Rene’s summary of state of the RMP Section as well as some of our on-going initiatives and call for proposal to host RMP Annual Conference.
I look forward to working with you as the RMP Section Chair for the year. I encourage all members to reach out to me with suggestions on new initiatives that RMP section can sponsor or support. Also, please don’t forget to invite your colleagues and students to join our RMP Section (details on how to join at the end).
Best wishes and Happy Holidays.
Ozge Sahin
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Annual State of the Section Address
Despite all the challenges imposed by COVID 19 during 2021, the RMP section has remained strong in all fronts including membership, finance and activities. In what follows I would like to provide a brief summary of the state of the RMP Section and introduce the new members of the board.
Membership:
As of October 2021, our membership reached 498 members with a split of 70% regular members and 30% student/retired.
In terms of demographics, our section has a composition that is similar to the overall composition of INFORMS with a predominantly male population. This is an area where we see an opportunity to grow and moving forward we need to keep working on expanding the diversity of our membership.
Finance:
Our finances remain healthy and have reached an all-time high at $90,715.
Activities:
A1. Conferences
- Annual RMP Conference: The annual 2021 section conference was successfully hosted by John Hopkins University last June. With more than 270 attendees (191 faculty/professionals and 84 students), the conference included 140 talks with 4 parallel tracks, 16 spotlight talks, 3 practice talks and two keynote speakers: Guillermo Gallego and Garrett van Ryzin. I want to take this opportunity to thank the organizing committee of the RMP conference Goker Aydin, Ozge Sahin and Ruxian Wang for putting together a fantastic and stimulating conference.
The 2022 RMP conference will be hosted in Chicago next June while the 2023 RMP conference will be hosted by Imperial College London.
- INFORMS Conference: The RMP Cluster at the 2021 INFORMS was organized by Francisco Castro (UCLA), Yao Cui (Cornell) and Negin Golrezaei (MIT). The cluster included 60 sessions and 260 talks. These are participation numbers consistent with pre-pandemic levels! A big thank you goes to Francisco, Yao and Negin for their effort in running a very successful cluster.
- Inaugural RMP Conference in Asia 2022 @ HKUST, June 2-4, 2022
A2. Competitions and Awards:
- The Inaugural RMP Data-Driven Research Challenge
- First Place: Abhishek Deshmane and Xabier Barriola. Riding the Gravy 'Trend'? Bandwagon Effect vs. Conspicuous Adoption of Music in User-Generated Content.
- Second Prize: Junyu Cao and Yan Leng. Adaptive Data Acquisition for Personalized Recommender Systems with Optimality Guarantees on Short-Form Video Platforms
Committee:
- René Caldentey (co-chair)
- Ming Hu (co-chair)
- Georgia Perakis (co-chair)
- Kostas Bimpikis
- Karan Girotra
- Srikanth Jagabathula
- Stefanus Jasin
- Jun Li
- Marcelo Olivares
- Senthil Veeraraghavan
- Dennis Zhang
- Jeff McGill RMP Student Paper Prize
- First Place: Omar Mouchtaki (Columbia). How Big Should Your Data Really Be? Data Driven Newsvendor and the Transient of Learning.
- Second Prize: Hannah Li (Stanford). Experimental Design in Two-Sided Platforms: An Analysis of Bias
Committee:
- Ali Aouad (LBS)
- Kimon Drakopoulos (USC)
- Yonatan Gur (Chair) (Stanford)
- Kris Johnson Ferreira (Harvard)
- Hamsa Sridhar Bastani (Wharton)
- Nikos Trichakis (MIT)
- Fanyin Zheng (Columbia)
- 2021 RMP Section Award
- Winners: José Blanchet (Stanford), Guillermo Gallego (HKUST) and Vineet Goyal (Columbia). A Markov Chain Approximation to Choice Modeling. Operations Research, Vol 64, No 4, 886-905, 2016.
Committee:
- Srikanth Jagabathula (NYU) - Chair
- Ming Hu (Toronto)
- Jun Li (Michigan)
- Gustavo Vulcano (UTDT)
A3. RMP Practice Webinar Series: (Connect practitioner with academics)
- Robert Phillips (Amazon)
- Vahab Mirrokni (Google)
- Nicolas Stier-Moses (Facebook)
Board Members and Elections:
I would like to take this opportunity to give a HUGE thank you to all the members of RMP section board 2020-2021:
- Vice Chair/Chair-Elect: Ozge Sahin (Johns Hopkins)
- Past Chair: Ming Hu (Toronto)
- Secretary/Treasurer: Ruxian Wang (Johns Hopkins)
- Board Members
- 2019-2021: Daniela Saban (Stanford)
- 2021-2022: Santiago Balseiro (Columbia)
- Collaborators
- Webmaster: Sami Najafi (Santa Clara)
- Newletter Editor: Yao Cui (Cornell)
- Social Media Coordinator: Sophia Huang (Vistex)
We have the following newly elected board members:
- Vice-chair/chair-elect: Omar Besbes (Columbia)
- Treasurer/Secretary: Yao Cui (Cornell)
- Board Member: Hamsa Bastani (Wharton)
The continuing board members are Ozge Sahin (chair), Rene Caldentey (past chair) and Santiago Balseiro (board member).
In closing, I want to thank all of you for having given me the opportunity to serve as chair of the RMP Section during 2021. It has been a great honor. I look forward to keep serving the RMP Section another year as past chair and I am sure that we will have another success year under Ozge’s leadership.
All the best for 2022!
Rene Caldentey
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Call for Proposal to host RMP Annual Conference
INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section invites proposals to host the Section's annual conference in 2024. The conference typically takes place in June and lasts for two days.
The RMP section annual conferences in 2022 and 2023 will be held at:
- RMP 2022, June 6-8 at University of Chicago
- Organizers: Rene Caldentey, Ozan Candogan, Rad Niazadeh
- RMP 2023, TBD at Imperial College
- Organizers: Kalyan Talluri, Zhe Liu, Anran Li
The Inaugural RMP Conference in Asia 2022 will be held at
- RMP 2023, June 2-4 at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
- Organizers: Guillermo Gallego, Ming Hu, Ying-Ju Chen, Qing Li, Qian Liu
The Section Chair manages the process of selecting the host in conjunction with the Section Board. The winning proposal will be decided by a majority vote of the Section Board under the rules governing the selection process. Please send your proposal to Ozge Sahin (Chair, ozge.sahin@jhu.edu) by January 28, 2022. Proposals for years beyond 2024 are also welcome.
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Practice Webinar Series
We launched the RMP practice webinar series in 2020 to better facilitate dialogues between academics and practitioners. We plan to run the webinar series as a regular event every quarter. So far, we have successfully hosted three webinars:
- The first webinar took place on October 7, 2020. Robert Phillips (Amazon) talked about “Pricing and Analytics - Challenges and Research Opportunities”.
- The second webinar took place on February 10, 2021. Vahab Mirrokni (Google) talked about “Recent Trends in Online Ad Markets: Robustness, Learning, and Automation”.
- The third webinar took place on May 12, 2021. Nicolas Stier-Moses (Facebook) talked about “Operations Management Research at Facebook”.
The video recordings are available on INFORMS site (https://connect.informs.org/rmp/rmpresources/webinar). Please stay tuned for upcoming seminars in early 2022!
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Student Live Paper Series
We launched the RMP student live paper series on youtube last year to promote works by RMP Section’s student members. This RMP student live paper series is an ongoing effort, and we will keep adding new presentations to the list. If you are interested, please send an email to RMPlivepaper20@gmail.com. All talks can be accessed through our youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVF0N1jTIgHOiepvKgrXAnw/videos.
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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: http://connect.informs.org/rmp/membership/how-to-join
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: http://connect.informs.org/rmp/membership/benefits
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