Message from the Section Chair
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 Gah-Yi Ban, Anran Li, Xiaocheng Li, Zhe Liu, and Kalyan Talluri for putting together a very successful and stimulating conference. Please see Jinglong Zhao’s reflections on this year’s conference below.
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.
Omar Besbes
Forthcoming RMP Board Elections
Every year, the Revenue Management and Pricing Section of INFORMS holds an election to choose three colleagues to serve on the Section Board:
- The Chair-Elect, who serves in this role for one year and goes on to serve as the Chair the year after
- The Secretary/Treasurer, who serves a one-year term
- A Board Member, who serves a two-year term
Gabriel Weintraub has headed the nominating committee. The Nominating Committee members are Gabriel Weintraub, Ozge Sahin, Vivek Farias and Omar Besbes.
Chair-elect:
- Srikanth Jagabathula, NYU
- Huseyin Topaloglu, Cornell University
Board member:
- Kris Ferreira, Harvard Business School
- Denis Sauré, University of Chile
Treasurer/Secretary
- Rad Niazadeh, Chicago Booth
- Fanyin Zheng, Imperial College
- 2023 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Conference
The Revenue Management and Pricing (RMP) conference, hosted this year by Imperial College Business School, proved to be a resounding success. This year's event marked the return to in-person conferences, after the online format in the past two years. The conference took place right before the Conference on Economics and Computation, which delved into complementary research themes. The conference provided a unique opportunity for attendees of both events to immerse themselves in the cutting-edge research driving the community forward.
As in preceding years, the conference once again showcased papers that were diverse both in terms of the applications and in terms of the methodologies. The thematic range of the sessions spanned an impressive spectrum, including assortment optimization, data-driven decision-making, data-sharing and information design, dynamic pricing, experimental design, fairness, inventory management, marketplace design, mechanism design, network revenue management, online learning, pricing and mechanism design, resource allocation, revenue management practice, service management, sharing and platform economy, and social networks and social media. In total, the conference featured a comprehensive program of over 100 talks encompassing these diverse topics.
Echoing the traditions of previous years, the conference presented papers that engaged in deep, profound explorations of numerous topics. For instance, within the dynamic pricing track, presentations by Arnoud den Boer (Amsterdam), Hanzhao Wang (in collaboration with Kalyan Talluri and Xiaocheng Li, both from Imperial), Wenxin Zhang (in collaboration with Santiago Balseiro and Will Ma, both from Columbia), Rajan Udwani (Berkeley, in collaboration with Vineet Goyal and Garud Iyengar, both from Columbia), Tarek Abdallah (Northwestern, in collaboration with Arash Asadpour from CUNY and Josh Reed from NYU), and Ningyuan Chen (Toronto, in collaboration with Xiaobo Li from NUS, Zechao Li from Tsinghua, and Chun Wang from Tsinghua) collectively offered comprehensive insights into optimal dynamic pricing strategies. Similar depth of exploration was offered across all other tracks, each delving into their respective subjects. I have learned a lot from going to these talks.
This year's conference featured three plenary sessions. During these sessions, Stefan Hunt from Keystone Strategy, Benny Moldovanu from the University of Bonn, and Nicole Immorlica from Microsoft Research shared their research around algorithmic collusion and market design topics. What set these plenary speakers apart was their blend of academic and industry backgrounds, allowing them to share a rich fusion of theoretical insights and practical experiences in the realm of revenue management. These plenary sessions shared valuable expert knowledge for better understanding of the topics. I found immense value in attending these sessions.
Congratulations to the organizers—Gah-Yi Ban, Anran Li, Xiaocheng Li, Zhe Liu, and Kalyan Talluri—for organizing such an exceptionally stimulating conference. With anticipation, I look forward to next year's conference, set to take place at UCLA.
Jinglong Zhao
Questrom School of Business, Boston University
- Forthcoming: 2023 INFORMS Annual Meeting, RMP Cluster
The 2023 INFORMS Annual Meeting will take place on October 15-18 in Phoenix, AZ. The Revenue Management and Pricing cluster are co-chaired by Ningyuan Chen (ningyuan.chen@utoronto.ca, Toronto), Daniel Freund (dfreund@mit.edu, MIT), and Rad Niazadeh (rad.niazadeh@chicagobooth.edu, Chicago). The RMP cluster sessions will feature a variety of exciting topics including sequential decision making and learning algorithms, data-driven revenue management, platform operations, matching markets, socially-aware operations, and empirical research. We look forward to seeing you in-person in Phoenix!
- Forthcoming: 2024 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Conference
-
- UCLA Andersen School of Management, Los Angeles, USA
- July 15-16, 2024
- Organizers: Francisco Castro and Velibor Misic
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Survey
The Revenue Management and Pricing Section is committed to providing a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment for all attendees to its events and initiatives. An inaugural committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) was formed last Autumn to formalize general principles and guidelines on how to approach DEI issues and advise the board on initiatives to promote diversity, equitable access to opportunities and a sense of belonging in our community. An important part of these efforts is a DEI survey prepared by the DEI Committee and launched in June 2023, which focuses your experience as a professional in your interactions with the RMP Section and your suggestions on potential new DEI initiatives.
So far, we have received many valuable inputs from our community. We would like to thank our members who have taken the survey for their contributions and support. In the meantime, we would like to encourage all of our members who have not yet participated in the survey to take the survey in the link below to support our DEI efforts:
The survey will close in the coming weeks. All responses are anonymous and completely confidential. Its aggregate results, along with a plan of action for proposed changes and new initiatives, will be discussed at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in October 2023. A summary of its findings will be made available on the RMP section website after the conference.
We look forward to learning your perspectives and discussing our future DEI initiatives at INFOMRS in October!
[Back to Top]
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 (https://connect.informs.org/rmp/rmpresources/webinar).
Please stay tuned for the upcoming seminars in 2023!
[Back to Top]
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 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVF0N1jTIgHOiepvKgrXAnw/videos. If you are interested contributing to the live student paper series, please send an email to the section chair.
[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]