Summer 2022

• Message from the Section Chair
• Forthcoming RMP Board Elections
• Conference Updates
• Practice Webinar Series
• Student Live Paper Series

Dear RMP members: I hope you had a productive summer.

 

In this newsletter, we would like to update you on a number of activities that our Section is pursuing as well as give you some updates on our future conferences (please mark your calendars). I want to take this opportunity to thank the organizing committee of the RMP conference Rene Caldentey, Ozan Candogan and Rad Niazadeh for putting together a very successful and stimulating conference. Please read Ruihao Zhu’s reflections on the conference below for more details and watch the recordings of Spotlight and Plenary Sessions on RMP Section YouTube Channel.

 

If you have any suggestions or questions, please feel free to reach out to me. Also, don’t forget to invite your colleagues and students to join our RMP Section (details on how to join at the end).

Best wishes.

 

Ozge Sahin

Professor of Operations Management and Business Analytics
Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

Every year, the Revenue Management and Pricing Section of INFORMS holds an election to choose three colleagues to serve on the Section Board: 

If you would like to recommend any colleagues for any of the three roles listed above, please let us know. To do so, please email the Chair of the Nominating Committee, Felipe Caro (UCLA, felipe.caro@anderson.ucla.edu), no later than September 5, 2022. The Nominating Committee members are Omar Besbes, Rene Caldentey, Felipe Caro, and Ozge Sahin.

 

The 2022 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing conference was hosted online by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Despite the virtual format, there was no doubt that it was a great success. The conference took place in the convenient Gather platform and has attracted speakers and attendees from across the world.

 

On its first day, the conference hosted presentations from the four finalists of the RM Practice Award. The RM Practice Award recognizes outstanding applications of revenue management and pricing techniques. In this year, we have learned a lot of great stories --- Srikanth Jagabathula (NYU) discussed the role of active learning in optimizing promotions at the store level with his partners; Zoey Jiang (CMU) and Jun Li (UMich) developed a competitive pricing method that can potentially help e-commerce retailers to dramatically increase revenue and profit; Hanwei Li (MIT), together with David Simchi-Levi (MIT), Rui Sun (Amazon), and Michelle Wu (MIT), presented their solid work on how to utilize large-scale data to effectively optimize price discount in a constrained environment for Zalando, a global online fashion retailer; Finally, Sridhar Seshadri (UIUC), Sebastian Souyris (UIUC), Sriram Subramanian (Pinterest), and Shiv Sehgal (RSG Media) shared their in-depth understandings in cable TV advertisement.

 

With over 100 interesting talks, the conference followed its tradition to exhibit a wonderful blend of diverse methodologies and application areas. For instance, in the plenary sessions, Tara Mardan and Philip Kaminsky from Amazon used multiple examples to demonstrate how different machine learning techniques can be leveraged in Amazon’s daily operations. I am particularly fascinated by the nice combination between contextual bandits and the recommendation systems at Amazon. Tim Graciano (Convoy Inc.) also showcased the broad applicability of data-driven analytics in the freight and trucking industry.

 

In the spotlight sessions and the regular sessions, many great talks were delivered as always. Hongfan Chen (CUHK) communicated to us his joint work with John R. Birge (UChicago), N. Bora Keskin (Duke), and Amy Ward (UChicago) on pricing in a multiagent learning. The paper creatively considers the practical revenue management scenario faced by many online platforms, and provides interesting and actionable characterization for the platform decision-makers to optimize revenue in an uncertain and multiagent environment. Qinyi Chen (MIT), Negin Golrezaei (MIT), Fransisca Susan (MIT), and Edy Baskoro (ITB) brought to us their nice piece on fairness of exposure in the assortment planning setting, and they developed elegant approximation algorithm-based approaches for the problem. In another talk, Ali Aouad (LBS) and Arnoud V. den Boer (UvA) formalized the study of tacit collusion between sellers in online marketplaces. They used an intuitive model, together with a simple machine learning algorithm, to demonstrate that collusive outcome can be made possible even under a limited feedback setting, where each seller only has access to her own sales data.

 

Congratulations to René Caldentey, Ozan Candogan, and Rad Niazadeh for organizing such an amazing conference amid this challenging time! We would love to thank you for the hard works to put all these together, and it was a great joy for us to attend this enlightening and wonderful conference. I also fully look forward to next year’s (hopefully in-person) conference at Imperial College, London!

 

Ruihao Zhu

SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University

 

The 2022 INFORMS Annual Meeting will take place on October 16-19 in Indianapolis, IN. It will be the first fully in-person INFORMS conference since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic! The Revenue Management and Pricing cluster are co-chaired by Ken Moon (kenmoon@wharton.uppenn.edu, Wharton), Will Ma (wm2428@gsb.columbia.edu, Columbia), and Rim Hariss (rim.hariss@mcgill.ca, McGill). The RMP cluster sessions will offer a variety of novel topics including learning algorithms, data-driven revenue management, platform operations, matching markets, and empirical research in revenue management. We look forward to seeing you in-person in Indianapolis!

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 our INFORMS site (https://connect.informs.org/rmp/rmpresources/webinar).

[Back to Top]

Student Live Paper Series

We launched the RMP student live paper series on YouTube last year to promote works by RMP Section’s student members. We plan to extend these series to include other recorded talks and webinars. This RMP student live paper series is an ongoing effort, and we will keep adding new presentations to the list. If you are interested, please send an email to RMPlivepaper20@gmail.com. Talks can be accessed through our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVF0N1jTIgHOiepvKgrXAnw/videos.

 
[Back to Top]

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

[Back to Top]