Message from the Section Chair
Dear Revenue Management & Pricing Section,
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve as the chair of the RMP Section in 2025. Throughout my career, I benefited from the section enormously and I appreciate the opportunity to serve the section in some small capacity.
Our field is thriving from the perspective of both academic output and practical impact. I thank all previous and current section officers and members for their efforts in placing our section in the forefront of all this activity. I thank our previous chair Vivek Farias for his service and leaving behind a strong section. I also would like to thank our outgoing officers and board members, Omar Besbes (past chair), Arnoud den Boer (board member) and Fanyin Zheng (treasurer/secretary), for their service, and welcome our new members, Stefanus Jasin (chair-elect), Ali Aouad (treasurer/secretary) and Antoine Desir (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 Vivek’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,
Huseyin
Annual State of the Section Address
In 2024, 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 2024, our membership reached 670 members with a split of 50% regular members and 50% 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 $105,534.
Activities:
I) Conferences
- Annual RMP Conference: The annual 2024 section conference was successfully hosted by UCLA Anderson of Management last July. With 200 attendees, the conference included 3 plenary sessions from industry experts (Uber, Google, CPUC), and 150 talks. I want to take this opportunity to thank the organizing committee of the RMP conference Francisco Castro and Velibor Mišić for putting together a fantastic and stimulating conference.
Mark your calendars! The 2025 RMP conference will be hosted by Columbia Business School (July 14-16, 2025)
The 2026 RMP conference will be held at University of Michigan Ross Business School.
The 2027 RMP conference will be held at University of Colorado Leeds School of Business.
- INFORMS Conference: The RMP Cluster at the 2024 INFORMS was organized by Antoine Desir (INSEAD), Hongyao Ma (Columbia), and Divya Singhvi (NYU). The cluster included 82 sessions and 338 talks. A big thank you goes to Antoine, Hongyao and Divya for their effort in running a very successful cluster.
II) Competitions and Awards:
- 2024 RMP Practice Award
- Winners: Gabriel Weintraub (Stanford), Daniela Saban (Stanford), Marcelo Olivares (Universidad de Chile). Saving Millions in Procurement Through Data Science and Market Design. INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics, Forthcoming.
- Committee:
- Srikanth Jagabathula (NYU) - Chair
- Setareh Borjian (Oracle)
- Kris Ferreira (HBS)
- Gustavo Vulcano (Torquato di Tella University)
- 2024 RMP Section Award
- Winners: Ilan Lobel (NYU). For his innovative approach to addressing complex problems in pricing and revenue management, including the use of real-time data to shape dynamic pricing strategies. His work spans a range of applications, from online platforms and multi-sided marketplaces to the sharing economy, such as ridesharing.
- Body of work:
- Cohen, Maxime C., Ilan Lobel, and Renato Paes Leme. "Feature-based dynamic pricing." Management Science 66.11 (2020): 4921-4943.
- Besbes, Omar, Francisco Castro, and Ilan Lobel. "Surge pricing and its spatial supply response." Management Science 67.3 (2021): 1350-1367.
- Lobel, Ilan. "Dynamic pricing with heterogeneous patience levels." Operations Research 68.4 (2020): 1038-1046.
- Committee:
- Daniela Saban (Stanford) - Chair
- Kostas Bimpikis (Stanford)
- Felipe Caro (UCLA)
- Jun Li (University of Michigan)
- Jeff McGill RMP Student Paper Prize
- Winners:
- Rachitesh Kumar (Columbia). “Strategically-Robust Learning Algorithms for Bidding in First-Price Auctions”, co-authored with Jon Schneider and Balu Sivan
- Akshit Kumar (Columbia). “Feature-Based Dynamic Matching”, co-authored with Yilun Chen, Yash Kanoria, and Wenxin Zhang
- Second Prize:
- Chao Qin (Columbia). “Optimizing Adaptive Experiments: A Unified Approach to Regret Minimization and Best-Arm Identification” co-authored with Daniel Russo
- Committee:
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Andres Cristi, EPFL
-
Antoine Désir, INSEAD
-
Can Küçükgül, Rutgers University
-
Chamsi Hssaine, USC
-
Daniel Freund, MIT
-
Divya Singhvi, NYU
-
Francisco Castro, UCLA
-
Hannah Li, Columbia University
-
Jackie Baek, New York University
-
Jiashuo Jiang, HKUST
-
Jinglong Zhao, Boston University
-
Lennart Baardman, University of Michigan
-
Mika Sumida, USC
-
Murray Lei, Queen's University
-
Pengyu Qian, Purdue University
-
Raghav Singal, Dartmouth College
-
Santiago R. Balseiro (chair), Columbia University
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Somya Singhvi, USC
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Tianyi Peng, Columbia University
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Wang Chi Cheung, NUS
-
Zhe Liu, Imperial College London
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 sincerely thank to all the members of RMP section board 2023-2024:
- Vice Chair/Chair-Elect: Huseyin Topaloglu (Cornell)
- Past Chair: Omar Besbes (Columbia)
- Secretary/Treasurer: Fanyin Zheng (Imperial College)
- Board Members
- 2022-2024: Arnoud den Boer (University of Amsterdam)
- 2023-2025: Kris Ferreira (Harvard)
- 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: Stefanus Jasin (Michigan)
- Treasurer/Secretary: Ali Aouad (MIT/LBS)
- Board Member: Antoine Desir (INSEAD)
The continuing board members are Huseyin Topaloglu (Chair), Vivek Farias (past chair), and Kris Ferreira (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 2024. 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 Huseyin’s leadership.
All the best for 2025!
Vivek Farias
Call for Proposal to host RMP Annual Conference
INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section invites proposals to host the Section's annual conference in 2028. The conference typically takes place in June or July and lasts for two days.
The RMP section annual conferences in 2025 and 2026 will be held at:
- RMP 2025, July 14-16 at Columbia Business School, New York City, NY
- Organizers: Santiago Balseiro and Will Ma
- RMP 2026, Date TBD at University of Michigan Ross School of Business, Ann Arbor, MI
- Organizers: Izak Duenyas, Hyun Soo Ahn, Jun Li, Stefanus Jasin, Joline Uichanco, Mohamed Mostagir, and Lennart Baardman
- RMP 2027, Date TBD at University of Colorado Leeds School of Business, Boulder, CO
- Organizers: Övünç Yılmaz and Dan Zhang
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 Huseyin Topaloglu (Chair, ht88@cornell.edu ) by March 1st, 2025.
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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