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 2023. It is a great honour to serve this community.
Our RMP Section is in great shape due to the relentless efforts of our previous chair, Ozge Sahin, and I would like to thank her for her service and all her work as chair. I also would like to thank our outgoing officers and board members, Rene Caldentey (past chair), Santiago Balseiro (board member) and Yao Cui (treasurer/secretary), for their service and welcome our new members: Vivek Farias (chair-elect), Mika Sumida (treasurer/secretary) and Arnoud den Boer (board member). I am also grateful to George Chen, Sophia Huang, and Sami Najafi for their continued service to the RMP Section as newsletter editor, social media coordinator and webmaster, respectively.
In the remainder of this newsletter you will find Ozge’s summary on the 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 ideas or suggestions on new initiatives that the RMP section can sponsor/support, or questions. Also, please don’t forget to invite your colleagues and students to join our RMP Section (details on how to join can be found at the end of the newsletter).
Best wishes,
Omar Besbes
Annual State of the Section Address
In 2022, 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 2022, our membership reached 514 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 $91,245.
Activities:
I) Conferences
- Annual RMP Conference: The annual 2022 section conference was successfully hosted by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business last June. With more than 270 attendees, the conference included 3 plenary sessions from industry experts (Amazon, Convoy, Google), 120 talks with 5 parallel tracks, 24 spotlight talks (recordings available on RMP YouTube channel). I want to take this opportunity to thank the organizing committee of the RMP conference Rene Caldentey, Ozan Candogan, Rad Niazadeh for putting together a fantastic and stimulating conference.
The 2023 RMP conference will be hosted in London (UK) next July, the 2024 RMP conference will be hosted by UCLA, and the 2025 RMP conference will be held at Columbia University.
- INFORMS Conference: The RMP Cluster at the 2022 INFORMS was organized by Rim Hariss (McGill), Will Ma (Columbia) and Ken Moon (Wharton). The cluster included 51 sessions and 203 talks. A big thank you goes to Rim, Will and Ken for their effort in running a very successful cluster.
II) Competitions and Awards:
- 2022 RMP Section Award
- Winners: Kostas Bimpikis (Stanford), Ozan Candogan (Chicago), Daniela Saban (Stanford). Pricing in Ride-Sharing Networks. Operations Research 67(3):744-769 2019
Committee:
- Ming Hu (Toronto) – Chair
- Vivek Farias (MIT)
- Nicole Immorlica (Microsoft)
- Paat Rusmevichientong (USC)
(From left to right, Ozge Sahin, Daniela Saban, Ming Hu, Kostas Bimpkis)
- Jeff McGill RMP Student Paper Prize
- First Place: Tianyi Peng (MIT). Markovian Interference in Experiments.
- Second Prize: Abishek Deshmane (IESE). Designing Layouts for Sequential Experiences: Application to Cultural Institutions
Committee:
- Bora Keskin (Duke) - Chair
- Francisco Castro (UCLA)
- Yao Cui (Cornell)
- Kaitlin Daniels (WUSTL)
- Karan Girotra (Cornell)
- Negin Golrezaei (MIT)
- Jun Li (Michigan)
- Meng Li (UH Bauer)
- Vahideh Manshadi (Yale)
- Sébastien Martin (Northwestern)
- Daniela Saban (Stanford)
- Nur Sunar (UNC)
- Ruxian Wang (JHU)
(From left to right, Bora Keskin, Tianyi Peng, Andrew Zheng)
- 2022 RMP Section Practice Award
- Winners: Sridhar Seshadri (UIUC), Sebastian Souyris (RPI), Sriram Subramanian (Pinterest), Shiv Sehgal (RSG Media). 9 Years of Substantial Revenue Increase by Scheduling Advertising Optimally and Seamlessly on Cable Television.
Committee:
- Maxime Cohen (McGill) - Chair
- Pavithra Harsha (IBM Research)
- Victor Martínez de Albéniz (IESE)
- Daniela Saban (Stanford University)
III) RMP Practice Webinar Series: (Connect practitioner with academics)
- Robert Phillips (Amazon)
- Vahab Mirrokni (Google)
- Nicolas Stier-Moses (Facebook)
- Tara Mardan (Amazon) and Joe Cooprider (Amazon)
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 2021-2022:
- Vice Chair/Chair-Elect: Omar Besbes (Columbia)
- Past Chair: Rene Caldentey (Chicago)
- Secretary/Treasurer: Yao Cui (Cornell)
- Board Members
- 2020-2022: Santiago Balseiro (Columbia)
- 2021-2023: Hamsa Bastani (Wharton)
- Collaborators
- Webmaster: Sami Najafi (Santa Clara)
- Newsletter Editor: George Chen (LBS)
- Social Media Coordinator: Sophia Huang (Vistex)
We have the following newly elected board members:
- Vice-chair/chair-elect: Vivek Farias (MIT)
- Treasurer/Secretary: Mika Sumida (USC)
- Board Member: Arnoud den Boer (U Amsterdam)
The continuing board members are Omar Besbes (Chair), Ozge Sahin (past chair) and Hamsa Bastani (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 2022. 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 Omar’s leadership.
All the best for 2023!
Ozge Sahin
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Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Committee
The section is setting up an inaugural committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) with the dual objective of: (1) forming general principles and guidelines on how to approach DEI issues and (2) advising the board on initiatives to promote diversity, equitable access to opportunities and a sense of belonging in our section.
Dorothee Honhon (UT Dallas) will lead this initiative and serve as the chair of this new committee. The committee members are to be determined. The committee will meet and advise the RMP board twice a year, meet monthly, prepare and administer a DEI survey to the members, and present the results at the July conference. If you are interested in serving in this committee, please reach out to Dorothee at dorothee.honhon@utdallas.edu.
Call for Proposal to host RMP Annual Conference
INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section invites proposals to host the Section's annual conference in 2026. The conference typically takes place in June or July and lasts for two days.
The RMP section annual conferences in 2023, 2024 and 2025 will be held at:
- RMP 2023, July 7-9 at Imperial College Business School, London, UK
Organizers: Kalyan Talluri, Zhe Liu, Anran Li, Gah-yi Ban, Xiaocheg Li
- RMP 2024, July 15-16 at UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center, Los Angeles, CA
Organizers: Francisco Castro and Velibor Mišić
- RMP 2025, Date TBD at Columbia Business School, New York City, NY
Organizers: Santiago Balseiro, Will Ma and Fanyin Zheng
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 Omar Besbes (Chair, ob2105@gsb.columbia.edu) by March 1st, 2023. Proposals for years beyond 2026 are also welcome.
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. So far, we have successfully hosted four 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 fourth webinar took place on April 7, 2022. Tara Mardan (Amazon) and Joe Cooprider (Amazon) talked about “Science of Pricing Experimentation at Amazon”.
The video recordings are available on INFORMS site (https://connect.informs.org/rmp/rmpresources/webinar).
Please stay tuned for the upcoming seminar from Nicole Immorlica (Microsoft) in Spring 2023!
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Student Live Paper Series and Spotlight Paper Presentations
We launched the RMP student live paper series on YouTube 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. We also showcase recordings of RMP Section Conference Spotlight Paper Presentations in section’s YouTube channel. You can access the recordings through our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVF0N1jTIgHOiepvKgrXAnw/videos. If you are interested contributing to the live student paper series, please send an email to the section chair.
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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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