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 2024. 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, Omar Besbes, and I would like to thank him for his service and all his work as chair. I also would like to thank our outgoing officers and board members, Ozge Sahin (past chair), Hamsa Bastani (board member) and Mika Sumida (treasurer/secretary), for their service and welcome our new members: Huseyin Topaloglu (chair-elect), Fanyin Zheng (treasurer/secretary) and Kris Ferreira (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 Omar’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,
Vivek Farias
Annual State of the Section Address
In 2023, 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 2023, our membership reached 598 members with a split of 53% regular members and 47% 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 with a balance of $106,184.
Activities:
I) Conferences
- Annual RMP Conference: The annual 2023 section conference was successfully hosted by the Imperial College Business School last July. With 168 attendees, the conference included 3 plenary sessions from industry/academia experts (Microsoft, Keystone Strategy, University of Bonn), and 119 talks with 4 parallel tracks. I want to take this opportunity to thank the organizing committee of the RMP conference Kalyan Talluri, Zhe Liu, Anran Li, Gah-yi Ban, and Xiaocheg Li for putting together a fantastic and stimulating conference.
Mark your calendars! The 2024 RMP conference will be hosted by UCLA (July 15-16, 2024)
The 2025 RMP conference will be held at Columbia University.
- INFORMS Conference: The RMP Cluster at the 2023 INFORMS was organized by Ningyuan Chen (Toronto), Daniel Freund (MIT), and Rad Niazedeh (Chicago). The cluster included 84 sessions and 329 talks. A big thank you goes to Ningyuan, Daniel and Rad for their effort in running a very successful cluster.
II) Competitions and Awards:
- 2022 RMP Section Award
- Winners: Santiago Balseiro (Columbia), Haihao Lu (Chicago), Vahab Mirrokni (Google). The Best of Many Worlds: Dual Mirror Descent for Online Allocation Problems. Operations Research, 2023, 71(1): 101-119
- Committee:
- Huseyin Topaloglu (Cornell) - Chair
- Kostas Bimpikis (Stanford)
- Felipe Caro (UCLA)
- Jun Li (University of Michigan)
- Jeff McGill RMP Student Paper Prize
- First Place: Alp Süngü (Wharton). Food Subsidies at the Base-of-the-Pyramid: Take-up, Substitution Effects and Nutrition.
- Second Prize: Yuri Fonseca (Columbia). Signaling Competition in Two-Sided Markets.
- Committee:
- Ali Aouad, London Business School
- Yonatan Gur, Stanford University
- Krishnamurthy Iyer, University of Minnesota
- Hongyao Ma, Columbia University
- Vahideh Manshadi (chair), Yale University
- Rad Niazadeh, University of Chicago
- Marcelo Olivares, University of Chile
- Ozge Sahin, Johns Hopkins University
- Mika Sumida, USC
III) RMP Practice Webinar Series: (Connect practitioner with academics)
- Committee:
- Robert Phillips (Amazon)
- Vahab Mirrokni (Google)
- Nicolas Stier-Moses (Facebook)
- Tara Mardan (Amazon)
- 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: Vivek Farias (MIT)
- Past Chair: Omar Besbes (Columbia)
- Secretary/Treasurer: Mika Sumida (USC)
- Board Members
- 2020-2022: Hamsa Bastani (Wharton)
- 2021-2023: Arnoud den Boer (University of Amsterdam)
- 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: Huseyin Topaloglu (Cornell)
- Treasurer/Secretary: Fanyin Zheng (Imperial College)
- Board Member: Kris Ferreira (Harvard)
The continuing board members are Vivek Farias (Chair), Omar Besbes (past chair), and Arnoud den Boer (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 2023. It has been a great honor. I look forward to keep serving the RMP Section another year as past chair and to a successful year under Vivek’s leadership.
All the best for 2024!
Omar Besbes
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee and Survey Result
The Revenue Management and Pricing Section is committed to providing a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment for all attendees to its events and initiatives. As part of these efforts, the Section’s DEI committee launched a DEI survey in June 2023, which focuses on questions which are specific to your experience as a professional in your interactions with the RMP Section, as well as questions regarding potential new initiatives to increase diversity, equity, inclusion and a sense of belonging in our community. The DEI committee received a total of 25 valid entries before the INFORMS conference.
Dorothee Honhon, the chair of the committee, presented some initial results of the survey at the RMP section meeting. Based on the survey results, it was encouraging to see that a significant percentage of respondents feel a strong sense of belonging within the RMP Section community. This positive feedback reaffirms our commitment to fostering an inclusive environment. At the same time, some members brought forward the question of equity and fairness in the review and award processes. In addition, the survey results provide valuable insights into potential new initiatives that can enhance diversity, equity, inclusion, and a sense of belonging within our community. The committee will continue to work with the section board in the coming year.
DEI Committee:
- Christiane Barz, University of Zurich
- Rene Caldentey, University of Chicago
- So Yeon Chun, INSEAD
- Dorothee Honhon (Chair), UT Dallas
- Stefanus Jasin, University of Michigan
- Jessie Jiang, Cornell University
- Zhen Liu, Benedictine University
- Daniela Saban, Stanford University
- Kostas Stouras, University College Dublin
- Hen Shang, Arizona State University
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 2024 and 2025 will be held at:
- 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 Vivek Farias (Chair, vivekf@mit.edu ) by March 1st, 2024. 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 at here. Please stay tuned for the upcoming seminars!
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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 here. 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 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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