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作者：Ning, Jie; Sobel, Matthew J.
作者单位：University System of Ohio; Case Western Reserve University
摘要：This paper characterizes the class of decomposable affine Markov decision processes (MDPs), which have continuous multidimensional endogenous states and actions, and Markov-modulated exogenous states. This class of MDPs has affine dynamics and single-period rewards, sets of feasible actions that decompose into bounded polytopes, and endogenous state variables that are nonnegative or nonpositive. It is shown that decomposable affine MDPs with discounted criteria have an affine value function an...
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作者：Zhan, Dongyuan; Ward, Amy R.
作者单位：University of London; University College London; University of Chicago
摘要：Most common queueing models used for service-system design assume that the servers work at fixed (possibly heterogeneous) rates. However, real-life service systems are staffed by people, and people may change their service speed in response to incentives. The delicacy is that the resulting service speed is jointly affected by staffing, routing, and payment decisions. Our objective in this paper is to find a joint staffing, routing, and payment policy that induces optimal service-system perform...
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作者：Chen, Xi; Wang, Yining; Wang, Yu-Xiang
作者单位：New York University; Carnegie Mellon University; University of California System; University of California Santa Barbara
摘要：We consider a nonstationary sequential stochastic optimization problem in which the underlying cost functions change over time under a variation budget constraint. We propose an L-p,L-q-variation functional to quantify the change, which yields less variation for dynamic function sequences whose changes are constrained to short time periods or small subsets of input domain. Under the L-p,L-q-variation constraint, we derive both upper and matching lower regret bounds for smooth and strongly conv...
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作者：Whitt, Ward; You, Wei
作者单位：Columbia University
摘要：We develop a time-varying robust-queueing (TVRQ) algorithm for the continuous-time workload in a single-server queue with a time-varying arrival-rate function. We apply this TVRQ to develop approximations for the periodic steady-state expected workload in models with a periodic arrival-rate function. We apply simulation and asymptotic methods to examine the performance of periodic TVRQ (PRQ). We find that PRQ predicts the mean of the periodic distribution and even the full distribution (specif...
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作者：Chen, Yiwei; Shi, Cong
作者单位：University System of Ohio; University of Cincinnati; University of Michigan System; University of Michigan
摘要：We consider a model wherein the seller sells a product to customers over an infinite horizon. At each time, the seller decides a set of purchase options offered to customers and the inventory replenishment quantity. Each purchase option specifies a price and a product delivery time. Customers are infinitesimal and arrive to the system with a constant rate. Customer product valuations are heterogenous and follow a stationary distribution. Customers' arrival times and product valuations are thei...
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作者：Ifrach, Bar; Maglaras, Costis; Scarsini, Marco; Zseleva, Anna
作者单位：Uber Technologies, Inc.; Columbia University; Luiss Guido Carli University; Tel Aviv University
摘要：Motivated by the proliferation of user-generated product-review information and its widespread use, this note studies a market where consumers are heterogeneous in terms of their willingness to pay for a new product. Each consumer observes the binary reviews (like or dislike) of consumers who purchased the product in the past and uses Bayesian updating to infer the product quality. We show that the learning process is successful as long as the price is not prohibitive, and therefore at least s...
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作者：Lejeune, Miguel A.; Turner, John
作者单位：George Washington University; University of California System; University of California Irvine
摘要：We study an online display advertising planning problem in which advertisers' demands for ad exposures (impressions) of various types compete for slices of shared resources, and advertisers prefer to receive impressions that are evenly spread across the audience segments they target. We use the Gini coefficient measure and formulate an optimization problem that maximizes the spreading of impressions across targeted audience segments, while limiting demand shortfalls. First, we show how Gini-ba...
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作者：Simchi-Levi, David; Trichakis, Nikolaos; Zhang, Peter Yun
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要：We study a prescriptive model for end-to-end design of a supply chain for medical countermeasures (MCMs) to defend against bioattacks. We model the defender's MCMs inventory prepositioning and dispensing capacity installation decisions, attacker's move, and defender's adjustable shipment decisions so as to minimize inventory and lifeloss costs subject to population survivability targets. We explicitly account for the strategic interaction between defender's and attacker's actions, assuming inf...
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作者：Nagarajan, Mahesh; Sosic, Greys; Tong, Chunyang
作者单位：University of British Columbia; University of Southern California; Tongji University
摘要：Stable alliance structures among critical (monopoly) component suppliers in a decentralized assembly system are somewhat well understood. However, when there are competing suppliers for any particular component, less is known about such alliances. The intent of this paper is to address some of the theoretical issues that pose challenges in analyzing stable supplier coalitions in such assembly systems. We examine a simple assembly system in which suppliers sell n distinct complementary componen...
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作者：Feldman, Jacob; Paul, Alice; Topaloglu, Huseyin
作者单位：Washington University (WUSTL); Brown University
摘要：We study a customer choice model that captures purchasing behavior when there is a limit on the number of times that a customer will substitute among the offered products. Under this model, we assume each customer is characterized by a ranked preference list of products and, upon arrival, will purchase the highest ranking offered product. Because we restrict ourselves to settings in which customers consider a limited number of products, we assume that these rankings contain at most k products....
