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 Francisco Castro and Velibor Misic for putting together a very successful and stimulating conference. Please see Alys Liang’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.
Vivek Farias
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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
Rene Caldantey has headed the nominating committee. The Nominating Committee members are Rene Caldentey, Omar Besbes, Vivek Farias and Huseyin Topaloglu.
The candidates in this year’s election are below and you can vote here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TL63ZSC
Chair-elect:
- Victor Araman, AUB
- Stefanus Jasin, Michigan
Board member:
- Antoine Desir, INSEAD
- Negin Golrezaei, MIT
Treasurer/Secretary:
- Francisco Castro, UCLA
- Ali Aouad, MIT
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Conference Updates
2024 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Conference
The 2024 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing (RMP) Conference, hosted by UCLA Anderson School of Management, was an exceptional success. Held at the UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center, the event brought together a diverse group of speakers and attendees from both academia and industry. The success of the event is credited to the meticulous organization and attention to detail by the organizing committee. Their efforts ensured a welcoming and intellectually stimulating environment where scholars could exchange knowledge, inspire ideas, foster collaborations, and push the boundaries of research.
This year’s conference upheld its tradition of showcasing cutting-edge research across a broad range of topics. With 150 talks presented in parallel sessions, the conference highlighted the latest breakthroughs in both theoretical and practical contributions. The sessions spanned topics such as assortment optimization, data-driven decision-making, dynamic pricing, information design, experimental design, matching, fairness, inventory management, marketplace design, mechanism design, network revenue management, online learning, resource allocation, service management, the sharing economy, demand management, routing, reverse logistics, sustainability, and human-algorithm interaction. Over two days, the conference offered a rich blend of theoretical advancements and practical applications, paving the way for future exploration in the field.
The presentations demonstrated research innovations in both breadth and depth. For example, in the area of assortment optimization, presentations by Anton Braverman (Northwestern), Heng Zhang (ASU), Kalyan Talluri (Imperial College), Mo Liu (UNC), Ken Moon (UPenn), and Mike Sumida (USC) collectively advanced customer choice models by adapting to generalized customer behaviors (e.g., multi-purchase) and evolving business contexts (e.g., speed of service, data availability, platform disengagement, and omnichannel interactions). Additionally, Shuo Sun (Berkeley) presented a comprehensive framework to effectively address the well-known joint assortment and inventory planning challenge, particularly accounting for stockout-based substitutions. In the retail operations stream, Atanas Dinev (MIT) revealed the unintended negative consequences of common review ordering policies and proposed pricing strategies to mitigate these effects. Meanwhile, presentations by Jane Yi Jiang (OSU) and Alireza Yazdani (California State Polytechnic University) analyzed strategies to combat high volumes of product returns. Presentations by Pnina Feldman (University of Virginia) and Yao Cui (Cornell) incorporated consumer behavior into welfare analysis related to experience products. Additionally, Yuexing Li (JHU), Man Yu (HKUST), and Soonbong Lee (Yale) expanded the research scope of revenue management by incorporating socially responsible operations, covering topics such as environmental awareness, food waste management, and refugee resettlement.
The RMP Practice Competition session was another highlight of the conference. The three finalists for the RM Practice Award shared their collaborative research projects with industry partners. Adam Elmachtoub (Columbia) presented the work with Amazon on optimizing pricing for Amazon Freight. Meanwhile, Scott Rodilitz (UCLA) discussed the collaboration with VolunteerMatch to refine ranking algorithms for non-profit organizations. Marcelo Olivares (U. de Chile) introduced the research on redesigning procurement mechanisms in collaboration with ChileCompra. These projects showcased the powerful synergy between academia and industry, demonstrating the tangible impact of research on real-world challenges.
This year’s conference also featured three plenary sessions that provided impressive insights into the field's current challenges and opportunities. Hamid Nazerzadeh (Uber), Paul Phillips (CPUC), and Paul Duetting (Google) shared their expertise on ride-hailing and delivery marketplaces, retail electricity markets, and large language model (LLM) applications. Their presentations, enriched by deep industry immersion and a solid foundation in revenue management methodologies, broadened our understanding of these areas and inspired new research directions.
Congratulations to the organizers, Francisco Castro and Velibor Misic, for orchestrating such a successful conference. Special thanks also go to the volunteers who guided us through this unforgettable experience—one filled with new friendships, innovative research ideas, and stimulating intellectual discussions that will undoubtedly fuel the excitement for next year’s RMP conference at Columbia University.
Alys Liang
Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University
Forthcoming: 2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting, RMP Cluster
https://meetings.informs.org/wordpress/seattle2024/
The 2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting will take place on October 20-23 in Seattle, WA. The Revenue Management and Pricing cluster are co-chaired by Antoine Desir (antoine.desir@insead.edu, INSEAD), Hongyao Ma (hm2852@columbia.edu, Columbia), and Divya Singhvi (ds6844@stern.nyu.edu, NYU). 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 Seattle!
Forthcoming: 2025 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Conference
Columbia Graduate School of Business, New York, USA
July 14-16, 2025
Organizers: Santiago Balseiro, Will Ma
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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.
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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 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.
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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 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