# Summer 2019

In this Issue:

Message from the Section Chair

I hope you are having a great summer!

We had an incredibly successful RMP conference at Stanford this year, with over 160 submissions and 102 accepted presentations. A highlight of the conference was the introduction of spotlight talks. These were 16 talks chosen by a program committee to be presented in a semi-plenary format, with additional time and followed by a discussant. I asked Ozan Candogan (Chicago) to write down his thoughts on the highlights of the conference. His comments on the conference are below. The conference was collocated with the Marketplace Innovation Workshop, which also had a standout year. I want to thank here the RMP conference organizers (Kostas Bimpikis, Yonatan Gur, Dan Iancu and Daniela Saban), the program committee, the conference discussants and all the authors for making this year's conference outstanding.

Next year, the RMP conference will take place at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on June 4 and 5. The organizers will be Goker Aydin, Ozge Sahin, and Ruxian Wang. If you are interested in hosting the conference in 2021 or 2022, the deadline for submitting bids is July 31.

It's also the time of the year to have elections to select the next set of RMP officers. I have asked Ramandeep Randhawa (USC) to organize the elections and invite candidates. Ramandeep was very thoughtful in his search and chose a fantastic group of candidates, which are listed below. You will receive soon an email inviting you to vote, which will include statements and bios of the candidates.

Candidates:

Vice-chair/chair-elect: Rene Caldentey (Chicago) and Huseyin Topaloglu (Cornell)

Treasurer/secretary: Arnoud den Boer (Amsterdam) and Jun Li (Michigan)

Board member: Bar Ifrach (Uber) and Daniela Saban (Stanford)

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments. I look forward to seeing you at INFORMS in Seattle!

Ilan Lobel

Stern School of Business, New York University

ilobel@stern.nyu.edu

Forthcoming RMP Board Elections

According to the section bylaws, there are three open officers and board member positions. The candidates are listed alphabetically below for each position:

Vice-chair/chair-elect

Treasurer/secretary

Board member

#### Daniela Saban (Stanford)

You will receive soon an email inviting you to vote, which will include statements and bios of the candidates. Section members can vote by logging into INFORMS Connect.

2019 INFORMS RMP Conference: Reflection

The Revenue Management and Pricing conference was hosted this year by Stanford GSB, and it was a great success. The conference took place following the Marketplace Innovation workshop (which covered complementary research themes), and gave an opportunity to the attendees of both events to enjoy the cutting-edge research conducted by the community.

As was the case in the previous years, the conference showcased papers that were diverse both in terms of the applications and in terms of the methodology. For instance, Kimon Drakopoulos (USC) presented an interesting application of information design to classical pricing problems. In his work (joint with Shobhit Jain and Ramandeep Randhawa of USC), he argues that when product availability is not guaranteed, by strategically signaling product availability and optimizing public posted prices, a seller can substantially increase her revenues. Furthermore, through private signaling of product quality, the seller can recover the benefits of personalized pricing even when she is restricted to using public posted prices. Chen Chen (Duke) presented his joint work with David Brown (Duke) and Santiago Balseiro (Columbia), where they took a closer look at pricing problems involving resources that relocate over a network. The paper is motivated by ride-sharing applications, and by focusing on a new asymptotic regime (where the number of resources and locations in the network jointly scale), the authors illustrate the benefits of dynamic pricing. Despite the inherent difficulty of solving dynamic pricing problems, they develop a new policy based on a Lagrangian relaxation of the problem and prove its asymptotic optimality in large networks. Kashish Arora (Cornell), together with Fanyin Zheng (Columbia) and Karan Girotra (Cornell), conducted an empirical study where they estimate customers’ disutility for using pooled transportation options compared with private ones. Their findings shed light on the design of shared transportation systems, and appear to be of first order importance for their operations.

This year the conference also included spotlight sessions. In these sessions, after authors presented their works, discussants commented on the findings of the papers. Often, the discussants provided an alternative perspective on the papers, highlighted the key findings and assumptions, posed interesting questions for future research, and helped the audience relate the findings of the papers to the existing literature. Overall, I found the discussions invaluable for better understanding the papers, and I hope that the conference will continue to have spotlight sessions in future years!

Congratulations to Kostas Bimpikis, Yoni Gur, Dan Iancu, and Daniela Saban for organizing such a stimulating conference! I look forward to next year’s conference, which will take place in Johns Hopkins!

Ozan Candogan

Booth School of Business, University of Chicago

Forthcoming: 2019 INFORMS Annual Meeting, RMP Cluster

October 20-23, 2019, Seattle, WA

Upcoming RMP Awards

2019 INFORMS RMP Section Prize

• The RMP Section Prize is awarded for the best contribution to the science of pricing and revenue management published in English. The award includes a plaque and a cash prize. The total cash prize is $1000 that is shared equally among the winners. The award is given each year at the INFORMS Annual Meeting if there is a suitable recipient. Papers that are eligible may be resubmitted the next year. • Committee: Victor Araman (AUB), René Caldentey (Chair, Chicago), Huseyin Topaloglu (Cornell), Gabriel Weintraub (Stanford) • Nominations should be sent to caldentey@chicagobooth.edu by July 31, 2019 • More information can be found at here. 2019 INFORMS RMP Section Student Paper Prize • The RMP Section Student Paper Prize replaces the retired RMP Dissertation Prize. The awards are planned to be given annually for student papers judged to be the best in the field of revenue management and pricing. The first prize is accompanied by a$500 honorarium. The second prize is accompanied by a $300 honorarium. All other finalists, if any, will be awarded$100. The number of finalists will depend on the number of entries. All prizes including finalists are accompanied by a plaque in addition to the cash award. All finalists and winners will be awarded at the RMP business meeting at the 2019 INFORMS Annual Meeting.
• Committee: Kostas Bimpikis (Stanford), Ming Hu (Chair, Toronto), Stefanus Jasin (Michigan)