speaker: Zizhuo Wang | Prof., The Chinese University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen. Takeaway: point of view of bridging practice and research. For industry solutions: Need to consider a lot of details Need to be fast and intepretation, therefore requires simple solutions Don’t care about theory. For academic works: Need abstract to focus Graced with time Expect some generality, therefore theory. TALK ABSTRACT: 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 projects and some of the research questions that come from those scenarios. ...

speaker: Ming Hu | Prof., University of Toronto Keys: random product offering/demand allocation/pricing algorithm. TALK ABSTRACT: 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 profitability over traditional separate selling. Second, we study how an e-commerce platform should assign sequentially arriving customers to sellers who compete to sell identical products on the platform. The allocation rule may be random and dependent on the sellers’ inventory levels. We show how such demand fulfillment randomization can incentivize sellers to hold more inventory and improve the platform’s profitability and customer welfare. Third, we study randomized promotions in which the firm randomly offers discounts over time to sequentially arriving customers with heterogeneous valuations and patience levels. We show how price randomization can improve the firm’s profitability beyond deterministic pricing policies. ...

speaker: Peng Sun | Prof., Duke University TALK ABSTRACT: 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. We show that conditional approval not only speeds access to drugs but also encourages the development of drugs that would not have been pursued otherwise. Using mechanism design principles, we show that regulators should conditionally approve a drug even if it is ex-ante less likely to prove efficacious, under certain conditions. The regulator should approve the drug to encourage investment, especially when only the firm knows the testing cost. However, drugs that are less likely to prove efficacious should only be conditionally approved for a portion of the patient population if that is enough to motivate testing. Additionally, the impact of conditional approval is greater when the firm’s revenue increases over time. Finally, a regulator should sometimes commit that in the future it will grant final approval for a drug that narrowly misses the efficacy threshold in return for the firm testing an otherwise unprofitable drug.

speaker: Ningyuan Chen | Prof., University of Toronto related paper: Allocating Divisible Resources on Arms with Unknown and Random Rewards TALK ABSTRACT: 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 the allocated resource. In particular, if the decision maker allocates resource $A_i$ to arm $i$ in a period, then the reward $Y_i$ is $Yi(Ai)=A_i\mu_i+A_i^b \xi_i$, where $\mu_i$ is the unknown mean and the noise $\xi_i$ is independent and sub-Gaussian. When the order $b$ ranges from 0 to 1, the framework smoothly bridges the standard stochastic multi-armed bandit and online learning with full feedback. We design two algorithms that attain the optimal gap-dependent and gap-independent regret bounds for $b\in [0,1]$, and demonstrate a phase transition at $b=1/2$. The theoretical results hinge on a novel concentration inequality we have developed that bounds a linear combination of sub-Gaussian random variables whose weights are fractional, adapted to the filtration, and monotonic.

speaker: Guillermo Gallego | Prof., The Chinese University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen. TALK ABSTRACT: 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 firm for a class of rational discrete choice models, and develop prophet-type inequalities that provide performance guarantees for the expected revenue of the traditional assortment optimization firm (a TAOP firm) relative to the clairvoyant firm, and therefore to any effort to personalize assortments. In particular, we show that the expected revenue of the clairvoyant firm cannot exceed twice the expected revenue of the TAOP for the RCS model, the MNL, the GAM and the Nested-Logit Model. On the other hand, there are random utility models for which personalized assortments can earn up to $n$ times more than a TAOP firm, where $n$ is the number of products. Our numerical studies indicate that when the mean utilities of the products are heterogeneous among consumer types, and the variance of the utilities is small, firms can gain substantial benefits from personalized assortments. We support these observations, and others, with theoretical findings. While the consumers’ surplus can potentially be larger under personalized assortments, clairvoyant firms with pricing power can extract all surplus, and earn arbitrarily more than traditional firms that optimize over prices but do not personalize them. For the price-aware MNL, however, a clairvoyant firm can earn at most $\exp(1)$ more than a traditional firm. ...

What an elegant name! It reminded me of the book Mostly Harmless Econometrics. Mostly OM is an annual international workshop sponsored by the School of Economics and Management, the Research Center for Contemporary Management, of Tsinghua University, focusing on the state-of-the-art research in Operations Management (OM), broadly defined. Mostly OM aims to provide a forum for researchers, from China and overseas alike, to foster interaction and exchange ideas, learn from each other new methodologies and applications, and explore opportunities for collaboration. ...

Andante cantabile(It.) is a direction often used by composers. In general, it means flowing and songlike. The andante tempo is known as the walking pace, and the pacing and energy should generally feel like a nice stroll. Cantabile [kanˈtaːbile], an Italian word, means literally “singable” or “songlike”. In instrumental music, it is a particular style of playing designed to imitate the human voice. To a large section of the public, however, it means one work, the 2nd movt., andante cantabile, of Tchaikovsky’s str. qt. No.1 in D (1871), Op.11. ...

Prologue In the highly competitive coffee market, a fierce price war erupted with the introduction of the ¥9.9 (~1.37USD) coffee, leading to dramatic changes for two major players: COTTI Coffee and luckin Coffee. Over the span of a year, this aggressive pricing strategy have caused COTTI’s slowing down in its pace of expansion, while luckin Coffee also saw its profits plummet, transitioning from profitability to significant losses. By Xu Qing | Edited by Jin Za ...

Here’s a professional, in-depth intepretation of the Liederabend performance of Changyong Liao, originally in Chinese, available here. The program selected works from Italy, Germany-Austria, and China, each with distinct artistic themes. It included classic Italian art songs by Paolo Tosti such as “The Last Song,” “I Love You No More,” and “Melancholy,” totaling five pieces. The repertoire also featured twelve Chinese art songs, including “Three Wishes of the Rose,” “Spring Thoughts,” and “The River Flows Eastward,” as well as Gustav Mahler’s song cycle “Songs of a Wayfarer.” ...

A two-day series on Lieder Today I had the privilege of attending a concert curated and performed by Changyong Liao, alongside his long-time collaborator, German pianist Hartmut Höll. The duo masterfully arranged a series of Lieder (aka, art songs) titled Three Wishes of the Rose: 16 Chinese Lieders. Witnessing these original composers interpret these songs was a profound experience, filled with a rich tapestry of emotions and beauty. The encore ’the seek of Prunus mume on a snowey day’. Watch here for the up-stairs version, and here for the front-seat version. ...