Spring 2018

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In this Issue:


Message from the Section Chair

I am writing to provide a few updates and reminders.

The signature event of our section, our annual conference, will take place at the Scotiabank Conference Center in Toronto, Canada on June 21-22. The conference will be hosted by Smith School of Business, Queen’s University. It will be preceded by the Marketplace Innovation Workshop on June 19-20. For more information, see here
. In addition, there are several other upcoming conferences, including the INFORMS Annual Meeting. Please find more information in this newsletter.

The RMP Board has been working on preparing the application for the 'society' status within the INFORMS structure. One important aspect of the application process is the membership count. We need to do our best to increase this number. If you forgot to renew your membership, or if you know friends and colleagues who may be interested in joining us, please refer them to the registration site. The section board recently sent a membership solicitation message to an email list compiled from recent conferences. A copy of this message is provided below. You can help by spreading the message and forwarding the email to your friends and colleagues.

As we mentioned in our last newsletter, the two flagship journals of INFORMS, Management Science and Operations Research, have recently introduced a new editorial area in Revenue Management and Market Analytics. Kalyan Talluri and Gabriel Weintraub serve as Department Co-Editors at Management Science, and Ramesh Johari and Gustavo Vulcano are Area Co-Editors at Operations Research. This is a great development for our section. The editors have prepared a message to introduce the newly created area. This message is also included below. Please support the new area by submitting your work there.

Several section awards are well underway. The RM&P Section Dissertation Prize is awarded for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of pricing and revenue management written in English. The committee is chaired by Hamid Nazerzadeh at USC and the submission deadline is August 11, 2018. The RM&P Section Prize is awarded for the best contribution to the science of pricing and revenue management published in English and is the highest honor conferred by our section. The committee is chaired by Omar Besbes at Columbia and the submission deadline is July 31, 2018. The RM&P Section Practice Award recognizes outstanding applications of revenue management and pricing techniques. In the last board meeting, the section board decided to change the frequency of the award to once every two years. The award will be skipped this year and come back in 2019.

Thank you for taking the time to read this newsletter. Please feel free to contact me for any suggestions regarding the aforementioned issues or anything else.

Dan Zhang
Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder
Email: dan.zhang@colorado.edu; Voice: (303) 492 2340

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Message for Membership Drive

Dear Colleagues:

We are writing to invite you to join the INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section (RMP Section). We hope that you will encourage your department’s PhD students and your junior colleagues to join our section as well. Since its inception in 1998, our section has been the main organization to promote the research and practice of revenue management and pricing.

The section holds an annual conference every year and hosts several awards for best contribution to the science of pricing and revenue management. During the last year, the section has made strides in several different areas. In particular, we are now represented in a new area called Revenue Management and Market Analytics in both Operations Research and Management Science, the two flagship journals of our profession.

With these exciting new developments and the growth in our reach and impact, we believe it is time for us to bring our section to the next level. Given the drive towards data-driven and analytics-oriented research and industry practice within the field (as reflected by the aforementioned new editorial areas), we are planning to broaden the scope of our INFORMS community and join forces with the marketplace analytics community (as it is happening in the recent joint annual Marketplace Innovation Workshop and RMP conference) to create a new Revenue Management and Market Analytics society.

The section board has been working on the society application since last year. The 'society' status will allow us to be better represented within INFORMS, including representation on INFORMS boards and councils. We will also be able to host special interest groups for researchers and practitioners with shared interests in more specialized topics. In the longer term, the section would like to start a new journal within INFORMS. A society status is critical for that to happen.

One requirement for a 'society' status within informs is a sustained membership count of over 500. We are currently a bit short of this requirement. When we looked at our conference programs and participants at several recent events, we noticed that many colleagues who either did not formally register as a member or allowed their membership to lapse. We would like to urge you to register or renew your membership. The membership only costs $15 for INFORMS members and $20 for non-members. A student membership costs $5. Note that you can join the section even if you are not an INFORMS member. To join the INFORMS RMP Section, follow this link.

Your active membership is crucial to the success of our community!

On behalf of the section board, I hope to meet you and our new members at the next Revenue Management Section Annual Meeting in Toronto.

Dan Zhang

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RM&MA in the Two Flagship INFORMS Journals

The two flagship journals of INFORMS, Management Science (MS) and Operations Research (OR), have recently introduced a new editorial area in Revenue Management and Market Analytics. We would like to bring this to your attention and encourage you to submit your relevant impactful research in this exciting and dynamic area.

Rapid changes in information, communication, and computing technology are altering all aspects of our economic interactions. Not only do these advances enable us to collect ever more detailed data on customer and firm behavior, they also enable much finer grained optimization of all the determinants of market outcomes.

These changes have made the practice of revenue management (including capacity allocation controls, dynamic pricing, dynamic bundling, bargaining and negotiated pricing, customized pricing, assortment optimization, auctions, etc.) relevant in a much wider range of industries: not only traditional applications such as airlines, hotels, and rentals, but also novel areas such as e-commerce, ride sharing, energy, railways, and road pricing.

These forces are also being borne out in the rise of online marketplaces across a wide range of industries: more than ever before, we are able to engineer the platforms governing transactions among market participants.  Market operators or platforms can control a host of variables such as pricing, liquidity, search and matching, information revelation, terms of trade, and transaction fees. Analogously, market participants have far greater control over bidding, pricing, assortment optimization, and revenue optimization.

The introduction of the Revenue Management and Market Analytics area in MS and OR is a response to this burgeoning area of research. There is a clear overlap in the papers that are suitable for both journals, with some slight differences in emphasis as stated in their editorial statements.

MS seeks well-written papers that are connected to reality, improve our understanding of the application domain at-hand, and ideally have a possibility of implementation. We look for a mix of approaches including modeling, theoretical, empirical, or computational. The paper should score high on most of the following criteria: (1) How realistic and significant is the application studied?; (2) How original/creative is the approach adopted?; (3) How significant would be its impact on practice?

Associate editors: Itai Ashlagi, Omar Besbes, Rene Caldentey, Arnoud den Boer, Karan Girotra, Stefanus Jasin, Ilan Lobel, Marcelo Olivares, Sridhar Seshadri, Huseyin Topaloglu.

OR seeks high-impact papers with deep roots in real problems, with a slight preference for (but not limited to) significant methodological or analytical contributions. We also welcome papers that excel in their modeling and/or computational approach to solve a relevant practical problem, supported by a well-documented numerical study, ideally based on real data.

Associate Editors: Omar Besbes, Rene Caldentey, William Cooper, Jose Correa, Vivek Farias, Ming Hu, Nicole Immorlica, Yash Kanoria, Ilan Lobel, Paat Rusmevichientong, and Huseyin Topaloglu.

Sincerely,

Kalyan Talluri and Gabriel Weintraub (Department Co-Editors, RM&MA, Management Science)
Ramesh Johari and Gustavo Vulcano (Area Co-Editors, RM&MA, Operations Research)

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Upcoming Conferences

  • 2018 INFORMS Revenue Management & Pricing (RMP) Conference
    • June 21-22, 2018
    • Scotiabank Conference Center, Toronto, Canada
    • The 18th Annual INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Conference will be hosted by the Smith School of Business, Queen's University. The conference will host:
      • More than sixty academic presentations
      • Talks by practitioners, on open RM problems from practice
      • Ample time to meet and catch up with your colleagues
    • This event is the premier forum for both academics and practitioners active in research in the fields of pricing analytics and revenue management. The conference will be held in conjunction with the Fourth Workshop on Marketplace Innovation (June 20, 2018). 

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Other Related Conferences







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Upcoming RMP Awards



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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. For more information click 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. For more information click here.

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