Oper. Res.Pub Date : 2022-11-17DOI: 10.1287/opre.2022.2407
Zheng Cui, Daniel Zhuoyu Long, Jin Qi, Lianmin Zhang
{"title":"The Inventory Routing Problem Under Uncertainty","authors":"Zheng Cui, Daniel Zhuoyu Long, Jin Qi, Lianmin Zhang","doi":"10.1287/opre.2022.2407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2407","url":null,"abstract":"In the inventory routing problem, the supplier acts as a central decision maker who determines the replenishment quantities and also, the delivery times and routes to all retailers. In “Inventory Routing Problem Under Uncertainty”, Cui et al. develop a novel framework for the uncertain inventory routing problem and allow ambiguity in the probability distribution of each retailer's uncertain demand. Adopting a service-level viewpoint, they minimize the risk of uncertain inventory levels violating a prespecified acceptable range. They quantify that risk using a new decision criterion, the service violation index, that accounts for how often and how severely the inventory requirement is violated. The solutions proposed here are adaptive in the sense that they vary with the realization of uncertain demand. They provide algorithms to solve the problem exactly and then, demonstrate the superiority of their solutions by comparing them with several benchmarks.","PeriodicalId":19546,"journal":{"name":"Oper. Res.","volume":"1 1","pages":"378-395"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73344230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Oper. Res.Pub Date : 2022-10-26DOI: 10.1287/opre.2022.2384
Omar El Housni, Huseyin Topaloglu
{"title":"Joint Assortment Optimization and Customization Under a Mixture of Multinomial Logit Models: On the Value of Personalized Assortments","authors":"Omar El Housni, Huseyin Topaloglu","doi":"10.1287/opre.2022.2384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2384","url":null,"abstract":"Assortment Personalization in E-commerce In the age of big data, online businesses have access to a tremendous amount of browsing and purchasing data from their customers. Consequently, there has been great effort in exploiting this data to offer personalized product assortments to each customer based on what is known about her or his preferences. A personalized assortment can potentially allow enhancing the customer experience as well as improving the revenue of the retailer. In “Joint Assortment Optimization And Customization Under A Mixture Of Multinomial Logit Models: On The Value Of Personalized Assortments,” Omar El Housni and Huseyin Topaloglu consider an optimization model that jointly optimizes the assortment of products carried by an online retailer as well as the personalized assortments offered to each customer. They study the value of personalization and develop algorithms with provable theoretical guarantees to solve the optimization problem.","PeriodicalId":19546,"journal":{"name":"Oper. Res.","volume":"13 1","pages":"1197-1215"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84289576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Oper. Res.Pub Date : 2022-10-14DOI: 10.1287/opre.2022.2373
D. Bertsimas, A. Delarue
{"title":"Policy Analytics in Public School Operations","authors":"D. Bertsimas, A. Delarue","doi":"10.1287/opre.2022.2373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2373","url":null,"abstract":"Optimizing School Operations, Holistically School districts in the United States face a variety of operational problems, often treated in isolation due to their inherent complexity: for instance, school assignment and school transportation are rarely considered jointly. We develop an optimization-based approach to three key problems in school operations: school assignment, school bus routing, and school start time selection. Our methodology improves upon the state of the art in two ways: by leveraging a simplifying assumption of fixed route arrival times to tractably optimize school bus schedules and school start times simultaneously, and by proposing a postimprovement heuristic to jointly optimize assignment, bus routing, and scheduling. We evaluate our approach on a practical case study.","PeriodicalId":19546,"journal":{"name":"Oper. Res.","volume":"46 1","pages":"289-313"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89821961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Oper. Res.Pub Date : 2022-09-30DOI: 10.1287/opre.2022.2376
Norris I. Bruce, A. Krishnamoorthy, A. Prasad
{"title":"Advertising Cycling to Manage Exclusivity Loss in Fashion Styles","authors":"Norris I. Bruce, A. Krishnamoorthy, A. Prasad","doi":"10.1287/opre.2022.2376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2376","url":null,"abstract":"How Should Fashion Brands Use Advertising to Increase Sales while Remaining Exclusive? Fashion consumption signals a consumer’s status to the broader population, so fashion brands and their consumers value exclusivity. Consequently, fashion advertising must balance sales generation with exclusivity loss. In this paper, we develop a model with these features of fashion and estimate it using advertising, price, and sales data for two styles of handbags and sunglasses. Our analysis provides insights for advertising budgeting and scheduling and finds that advertising optimally should decrease as the product increases in popularity and vice versa. This exerts a braking force on sales oscillations so that the fashion cycle decays as does the optimal advertising path. In addition to demonstrating how advertising cycling can impact a fashion firm’s profitability, we show how different styles of a fashion brand can cycle at different rates. By connecting advertising cycles to fashion cycles, we provide prescriptions for how fashion firms should manage different styles of the same brand.","PeriodicalId":19546,"journal":{"name":"Oper. Res.","volume":"2 1","pages":"3125-3142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78523314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Oper. Res.Pub Date : 2022-09-28DOI: 10.1287/opre.2022.2369
P. Fontaine, S. Minner
{"title":"A Branch-and-Repair Method for Three-Dimensional Bin Selection and Packing in E-Commerce","authors":"P. Fontaine, S. Minner","doi":"10.1287/opre.2022.2369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2369","url":null,"abstract":"Selecting a Parcel Type Portfolio to Reduce Unused Space in Transportation Wrongly sized parcels lead to unused space and inefficient transportation. With continuously increasing e-commerce and last-mile delivery volumes, available parcel types at a warehouse can significantly impact unused space that is transported. In “A Branch-and-Repair Method for Three-Dimensional Bin Selection and Packing in E-Commerce,” Fontaine and Minner solve the trade-off between cost of unused space and cost of parcel variety through optimizing the portfolio of available parcel types. To solve large instances with millions of binary decision variables, the authors develop an exact decomposition method that allows for relaxing many binary variables, improves branch-and-check by repairing infeasible solutions, and shows how to avoid solving many subproblems. A case study using real data shows the efficiency of the proposed method and the impact of the portfolio on unused transportation space.","PeriodicalId":19546,"journal":{"name":"Oper. Res.","volume":"1 1","pages":"273-288"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86850675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Oper. Res.Pub Date : 2022-09-27DOI: 10.1287/opre.2022.2351
K. Talluri, A. Tsoukalas
{"title":"Revenue Management of a Professional Services Firm with Quality Revelation","authors":"K. Talluri, A. Tsoukalas","doi":"10.1287/opre.2022.2351","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2351","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, the authors tackle the operational problem of managing a professional service firm (PSF). A PSF, such as a management consulting firm, law firm, or an accounting firm, has employees of varying skills, backgrounds, qualifications, and experience. The operational problem of PSFs can be summarized as a bidding-cum-matching problem where the probability of winning depends on the quality of the employees promised for the job as well as the price quoted in the bid. Should the employees (hence, the quality) be committed as part of the bid, or should the firm rely on reputation? How much should the firm bid, given one or the other strategy and available resources, taking future bids into consideration? How many employees of each type should the firm have on hand? What is the optimal utilization level of each type? These are some of the questions this paper addresses.","PeriodicalId":19546,"journal":{"name":"Oper. Res.","volume":"27 1","pages":"1260-1276"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83699338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Oper. Res.Pub Date : 2022-09-26DOI: 10.1287/opre.2022.2300
Hossein Piri, W. T. Huh, Steven M. Shechter, D. Hudson
{"title":"Individualized Dynamic Patient Monitoring Under Alarm Fatigue","authors":"Hossein Piri, W. T. Huh, Steven M. Shechter, D. Hudson","doi":"10.1287/opre.2022.2300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2300","url":null,"abstract":"Individualized Patient Monitoring Under Alarm Fatigue Hospitals are rife with alarms, many of which are false. This leads to alarm fatigue, in which clinicians become desensitized and may inadvertently ignore real threats. “Individualized Dynamic Patient Monitoring Under Alarm Fatigue” by Piri, Huh, Shechter, and Hudson studies the problem of personalizing alarm thresholds for vital signs at a hospital while considering the ”boy who cried wolf” effect of false alarms. The authors create a model that learns patients’ personal alarm thresholds during their hospital stay and updates their alarm settings dynamically. They formulate the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process. They provide structural properties of the optimal policy and perform a numerical case study based on clinical data from an intensive care unit. They show that dynamic methods of alarm settings that explicitly consider the feedback loop of false positives can significantly reduce patient harm when compared with current methods of alarm settings.","PeriodicalId":19546,"journal":{"name":"Oper. Res.","volume":"26 1","pages":"2749-2766"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78085103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Oper. Res.Pub Date : 2022-09-26DOI: 10.1287/opre.2022.2372
Costis Maglaras, M. Scarsini, Dongwook Shin, Stefano Vaccari
{"title":"Product Ranking in the Presence of Social Learning","authors":"Costis Maglaras, M. Scarsini, Dongwook Shin, Stefano Vaccari","doi":"10.1287/opre.2022.2372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2372","url":null,"abstract":"Optimal Policies for Online Platforms When Social Learning Occurs Before buying products online, consumers read the reviews written by the previous customers. If they buy the product, they write a review themselves. When the product is of unknown quality, consumers learn it over time; that is, social learning occurs. If consumers have various purchase options of similar products of different brands, the platform that they use may affect this social learning by choosing the order in which the products appear on its website. In “Product Ranking in the Presence of Social Learning,” Maglaras, Scarsini, Shin, and Vaccari compare various policies that the platform may adopt, with the goal of maximizing its revenue collected from commission fees for sold items. The criterion to compare the policies is the worst-case regret with respect to a fully informed platform benchmark.","PeriodicalId":19546,"journal":{"name":"Oper. Res.","volume":"48 1","pages":"1136-1153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78987548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Oper. Res.Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1287/opre.2022.2356
M. Grabisch, A. Mandel, A. Rusinowska
{"title":"On the Design of Public Debate in Social Networks","authors":"M. Grabisch, A. Mandel, A. Rusinowska","doi":"10.1287/opre.2022.2356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2356","url":null,"abstract":"How to Avoid Polarization in Social Networks In order to facilitate social interactions and the design of deliberative and efficient institutions, a social planner should ensure that diverse opinions can be sustained and debated and ensuring social cohesion. Grabisch et al. provide a theory of the efficient design of public debate. They develop a model of the coevolution of opinions and social relations that allow them to frame this problem in a formal setting. This model of opinion dynamics accounts for the persistence of heterogeneous opinions in society (“strong diversity”) and the dynamic interactions between opinions and social connections. The social planner faces a trade-off between fostering the convergence of opinions in society and increasing the risk of polarization and instability. To resolve this trade-off, the social planner must account for both structural and behavioral characteristics: how fragile is the social network and to what extent individuals tolerate disagreement with their peers.","PeriodicalId":19546,"journal":{"name":"Oper. Res.","volume":"18 1","pages":"626-648"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84779171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revenue Management Under a Mixture of Independent Demand and Multinomial Logit Models","authors":"Yufeng Cao, Paat Rusmevichientong, Huseyin Topaloglu","doi":"10.1287/opre.2022.2333","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2333","url":null,"abstract":"Discrete choice models have recently attracted significant attention to model demand in revenue-management applications, as they can capture the fact that if a product is unavailable, then some customers substitute for this product, whereas others leave the system without a purchase. Although a more sophisticated choice model may capture the choice process of the customers more faithfully, a simpler choice model may result in tractable optimization problems when finding the optimal assortment of products to offer or prices to charge. One approach for coming up with sophisticated choice models is to mix existing ones, where the different segments of customers choose under the different choice models in the mixture. In “Revenue Management Under a Mixture of Independent Demand and Multinomial Logit Models,” Cao, Rusmevichientong, and Topaloglu demonstrate that mixing the independent demand and multinomial logit models can significantly increase the modeling flexibility of each of these choice models, while keeping the corresponding operational assortment optimization problems tractable.","PeriodicalId":19546,"journal":{"name":"Oper. Res.","volume":"35 1","pages":"603-625"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80628534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}