I hope this message finds you safe and well!
I am excited to announce the inaugural RMP Data-Driven Research Challenge. The RMP section and NetEase Cloud Music are partnering to offer our members access to NetEase Cloud Music App's impression-level data to encourage data-driven research on innovative marketplaces. (Recall that we offer student membership for free.) There is one year ahead to crunch the data. A special track during the RMP 2021 Conference will be dedicated to the finalists, with winners announced at the conference.
As it is not clear when things will go back to normal, I hope you and your loved ones remain healthy and safe during this extremely challenging period!
Ming Hu
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto
ming.hu@rotman.utoronto.ca
[Return to Top]
Annual State of the Section Address
Dear Revenue Management & Pricing Section Members,
It was a pleasure serving as section chair last year. Our section continues to grow and is currently in a strong position. We have grown to have 482 members (as of INFORMS 2019), our biggest membership numbers yet. Our growing membership is tightly coupled with our growth in scope, with our section publication and presentation venues inviting work on Market Analytics in addition to classical Revenue Management and Pricing. Finally, our financials are also quite healthy, with the section having over 88 thousand dollars in reserve.
At the section business meeting at INFORMS, we made a few announcements. First, we announced an inaugural RMP Asia Conference in Hong Kong, that unfortunately we've had to cancel due to the current challenging situation regarding travel in China and Hong Kong. On a different note, Queens University decided to endow our student paper prize in honor of Jeff McGill, a celebrated member of our community who passed away in 2018.
The success of our section depends on the efforts on many people, who I'd like to acknowledge. I want to thank our departing board members (Dan Zhang, Ozge Sahin and Kalyan Talluri), our remaining board member (Ming Hu and Stefanus Jasin), our incoming board members (chair-elect/vice-chair Rene Caldentey, secretary/treasurer Jun Li and board member Daniela Saban), our election coordinator Ramandeep Randhawa, the other candidates for board positions, the section volunteers (webmaster Sami Najafi, newsletter editor Yao Cui, sponsorship coordinator John Quillinan and social media coordinator Sophia Huang), the award committee members, the section conference organizers, the INFORMS cluster chairs and the journal editors and referees who serve our section departments in the different journals.
It's been a privilege serving as your section this past year. The section is now in the great hands of Ming Hu. I wish him and the section tremendous success!
Sincerely,
Ilan Lobel
NYU Stern School of Business
[Return to Top]
2020 RMP Data-Driven Research Challenge
The INFORMS/Revenue Management & Pricing (RMP) Section and NetEase Cloud Music are partnering to offer RMP members access to NetEase Cloud Music App’s impression-level data to encourage data-driven research on innovative marketplaces.
In this competition, researchers will compete by building data-driven models using real data to address either some of the suggested questions below or questions of their own interest.
Process:
Eligibility Criteria: Who can enter?
(1) RMP members are encouraged to participate.
(2) At least one author of the submitted paper must be an existing RMP member in 2020.
(3) Each RMP member may enter the competition by submitting at most one paper.
Judging Criteria: What the judges will be looking for?
All entries will be judged according to the following criteria
Criteria 1: Data-Driven.
Criteria 2: Potential Impact on Practice.
Criteria 3: Contribution to the Research Literature.
Criteria 4: Generalizability / Scalability.
Timeline:
April 1st, 2021: Competition submissions deadline.
May 2021: Judges to review submissions and select finalists.
June 2021 during the RMP Section 2021 conference (exact date TBA): Finalist presentations, judges select winners, and winner(s) announcement.
* Finalists can opt to have their reviews by judges forwarded to the Revenue Management and Market Analytics department at Management Science if they choose to make a submission to that department.
* Finalist will be invited for a Fast Track submission to the Revenue Management and Marketplace Design department at Naval Research Logistics. Fast Track means that the paper will go through 1 round of review before making a final decision.
Data Acquisition and Submission Guidelines:
(1) You need to be an RMP member in 2020. See how to join.
(2) You need to use your INFORMS Member ID and Password to access the data.
(3) You can access the data here.
(4) Before the deadline, you can submit the paper to RMPDataCompetition2020@gmail.com with the subject “2020 Data-Driven Research Challenge”.
* If you have any further questions, please email one of the co-chairs.
Guidelines:
NetEase Cloud Music would like to encourage researchers to explore the provided data and develop innovative solutions to address the following problems (or other research problems of their own choosing):
- The company defines a user to be inactive if she has a zero or very low average click probability on recommended cards. How could the company differentiate active users from inactive users? How could the company design the recommender system to minimize the number of inactive users?
- What are the characteristics and preferences of active users on the platform? How could the platform predict whether a user will be active or inactive from her early-on actions, such as clicks, likes, and shares? How could the platform design the recommender system to maximize the number of active users?
- How do different types of feedback information, such as the number of likes and follows, change a creator's motivation to publish new content? How could the platform design the recommender system to encourage creators to create more content?
- The company's long-term goal on the tab is to maximize the daily number of clicks/plays and the daily number of content created. How could the company create a recommender system that trades off short-term goals, such as the number of clicks/plays in one day, with this long-term goal?
Committee Bio:
[Return to Top]
Conference Updates
2020 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Conference (Canceled)
The 2020 Revenue Management and Pricing (RMP) Conference and Marketplace Innovation Workshop (MIW) will be canceled. Both the RMP conference and MIW have received more than 100 abstracts this year. We hope everyone stays safe and healthy, and look forward to getting together in 2021!
Johns Hopkins University will host the RMP Conference in 2021, University of Chicago in 2022 and Imperial College London in 2023.
2020 INFORMS Annual Meeting