Mostly OM

Prof. Ningyuan Chen

Prof. Ningyuan ChenUniversity of TorontoTalk:Allocating Divisible Resources on Arms with Unknown and Random RewardsAbstract:We consider a decision maker allocating one unit of renewable and divisible resource in each period on a number of arms. The arms have unknown and random rewards whose means are proportional to the allocated resource and whose variances are proportional to an order b of th...

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Prof. Guillermo Gallego

Prof. Guillermo GallegoThe Chinese University of Hong Kong-ShenzhenTalk: The Limits of Personalization in Assortment OptimizationAbstract: To study the limits of personalization, we introduce the notion of a clairvoyant firm  that can read the mind of consumers and sell them the highest revenue product that they are willing to buy. We show how to compute the expected revenue of the clairvoyant ...

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Prof. Ming Hu

Prof. Ming HuUniversity of TorontoTalk: Randomization in Product, Fulfillment, and Pricing as a Profit LeverAbstract: First, we study blind boxes as a novel selling mechanism in which buyers purchase sealed packages containing unknown items, with the chance of uncovering rare or special items. We show how such product randomization introduced by the blind box can improve the seller’s profitabi...

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Prof. Junfei Huang

Prof. Junfei HuangThe Chinese University of Hong KongTalk: Capacity Allocation and Scheduling in Two-Stage Service Systems with Multi-Class CustomersAbstract: We consider a tandem queueing system, in which stage 1 has one station serving multiple classes of arriving customers with different service requirements and related delay costs, and stage 2 has multiple parallel stations, with each stati...

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Prof. Lauren Lu

Prof. Lauren LuDartmouth CollegeTalk: Gender Bias in Job Assignment: Evidence from Retail Frontline ManagersAbstract: While anecdotes suggest that workplace gender disparities may originate early in the management career hierarchy, the existing literature on this topic has not provided sufficient evidence due to lack of real-world personnel data concerning low-level managers. This study address...

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Prof. Peng Sun

Prof. Peng SunDuke UniversityTalk: Optimal Conditional Drug ApprovalAbstract: New prescription drugs require regulatory approval before drug makers can sell them. In some countries, regulators may conditionally approve a drug, which allows sales to begin before the developer has proven the drug's efficacy. After further testing, the regulator may either grant final approval or reject the drug. ...

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Prof. Zizhuo Wang

Prof. Zizhuo WangThe Chinese University of Hong Kong-ShenzhenTalk: Practicing OR/OM in China: A Few Application Cases and Research ProjectsAbstract: In the past years, there have been growing number of companies in China that adopt OR methods in their operations. There are also several interesting research questions that arise in those application problems. In this talk, we present some recent ...

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Prof. Yao Xie

Prof. Yao XieGeorgia Institute of TechnologyTalk: Flow-based Distributionally Robust OptimizationAbstract: We present a computationally efficient framework, called 𝙵𝚕𝚘𝚠𝙳𝚁𝙾, for solving flow-based distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems with Wasserstein uncertainty sets while aiming to find continuous worst-case distribution (also called the Least Favorable Distr...

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Prof. Jiaming Xu

Prof. Jiaming XuDuke UniversityTalk: Fundamental limits for broken sample problemsAbstract: In this talk, I will explore a classic statistical challenge: the broken sample problem. Imagine a random sample of vectors is drawn from a joint distribution. Before observing them, each vector in the sample is broken into two subvectors and the original pairing information is lost. The central question...

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Prof. ​Xiaowei Zhang

Prof. Xiaowei ZhangThe Hong Kong University of Science and TechnologyTalk: Self-fulfilling Bias in Algorithmic Decision-makingAbstract: In the standard data analysis framework, data is collected (once for all), and then data analysis is carried out. However, with the advancement of digital technology, decision-makers constantly analyze past data and generate new data through their decisions. We...

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Prof. ​Enlu Zhou

Prof. Enlu ZhouGeorgia Institute of TechnologyTalk: Bayesian Approaches to Data-driven Stochastic OptimizationAbstract: A large class of stochastic optimization problems involves optimizing an expectation taken with respect to an underlying distribution that is unknown in practice. One popular approach to addressing distributional uncertainty, known as the distributionally robust optimization (...

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