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作者：Karlin, Anna R.; Klein, Nathan; Gharan, Shayan Oveis
作者单位：University of Washington; University of Washington Seattle
摘要：For some epsilon > 10(-36), we give a randomized 3/2 - epsilon approximation algorithm for metric TSP.
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作者：Perakis, Georgia; Singhvi, Divya
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); New York University
摘要：We consider the dynamic pricing problem of a retailer who does not have any information on the underlying demand for a product. The retailer aims to maximize cumulative revenue collected over a finite time horizon by balancing two objectives: learning demand and maximizing revenue. The retailer also seeks to reduce the amount of price experimentation because of the potential costs associated with price changes. Existing literature solves this problem in the case where the unknown demand is par...
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作者：Blaettchen, Philippe; Taneri, Niyazi; Hasija, Sameer
作者单位：City St Georges, University of London; University of Cambridge; INSEAD Business School
摘要：Technological advances enable new business models for heavy equipment manufacturers wherein customers access equipment without ownership. We seek to understand the profitability and environmental performance of different emerging business models in light of salient economic and operational factors. We develop a game-theoretic model to identify the optimal choice between a traditional ownership-based business model and two access-based models: servicization and peer-to-peer sharing. After-sales...
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作者：He, Shengyi; Jiang, Guangxin; Lam, Henry; Fu, Michael C.
作者单位：Columbia University; Harbin Institute of Technology; University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park
摘要：In solving simulation-based stochastic root-finding or optimization problems that involve rare events, such as in extreme quantile estimation, running crude Monte Carlo can be prohibitively inefficient. To address this issue, importance sampling can be employed to drive down the sampling error to a desirable level. However, selecting a good importance sampler requires knowledge of the solution to the problem at hand, which is the goal to begin with and thus forms a circular challenge. We inves...
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作者：den Boer, Arnoud V.; Chen, Boxiao; Wang, Yining
作者单位：University of Amsterdam; University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Chicago; University of Illinois Chicago Hospital; University of Texas System; University of Texas Dallas
摘要：We consider the problem of determining the optimal prices and product configurations of horizontally differentiated products when customers purchase according to a locational (Hotelling) choice model and where the problem parameters are initially unknown to the decision maker. Both for the single-product and multiple-product setting, we propose a data-driven algorithm that learns the optimal prices and product configurations from accumulating sales data, and we show that their regret-the expec...
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作者：Birge, John R.; Chen, Hongfan (Kevin); Keskin, N. Bora; Ward, Amy
作者单位：University of Chicago; Chinese University of Hong Kong; Duke University
摘要：We consider a platform in which multiple sellers offer their products for sale over a time horizon of T periods. Each seller sets its own price. The platform collects a fraction of the sales revenue and provides price-setting incentives to the sellers to maximize its own revenue. The demand for each seller's product is a function of all sellers' prices and some customer features. Initially, neither the platform nor the sellers know the demand function, but they can learn about it through sales...
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作者：Lee, Ilbin
作者单位：University of Alberta
摘要：In recent applications of Markov decision processes (MDPs), it is common to estimate transition probabilities and rewards from transition data. In healthcare and some other applications, transition data are collected from a population of different entities, such as patients. Thus, one faces a modeling question of whether to estimate different models for subpopulations (e.g., divided by smoking status). For instance, there may be a subpopulation whose disease status progresses faster than other...
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作者：Yang, Bo; Nadarajah, Selvaprabu; Secomandi, Nicola
作者单位：Carnegie Mellon University; University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Chicago; University of Illinois Chicago Hospital
摘要：We study merchant energy production modeled as a compound switching and timing option. The resulting Markov decision process is intractable. Least squares Monte Carlo combined with information relaxation and duality is a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning methodology to obtain operating policies and optimality gaps for related models. Pathwise optimization is a competing technique developed for optimal stopping settings, in which it typically provides superior results compared with this a...
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作者：Long, Zhenghua; Zhang, Hailun; Zhang, Jiheng; Zhang, Zhe George
作者单位：Nanjing University; Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data; The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen; Hong Kong University of Science & Technology; Western Washington University; Simon Fraser University
摘要：We study the optimal control of a queueing model with a single customer class and heterogeneous server pools. The main objective is to strike a balance between the holding cost of the queue and the operating costs of the server pools. We introduce a target-allocation policy, which assigns higher priority to the queue or pools without enough customers for general cost functions. Although we can prove its asymptotic optimality, implementation requires solving a nonlinear optimization problem. Wh...
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作者：Bai, Yicheng; Feldman, Jacob; Segev, Danny; Topaloglu, Huseyin; Wagner, Laura
作者单位：Washington University (WUSTL); Tel Aviv University; Universidade Catolica Portuguesa
摘要：In this paper, we introduce the Multi-Purchase Multinomial Logit choice model, which extends the random utility maximization framework of the classical Multinomial Logit model to a multiple-purchase setting. In this model, customers sample random utilities for each offered product as in the Multinomial Logit model. However, rather than focusing on a single product, they concurrently sample a budget parameter M , which indicates the maximum number of products that the customer is willing to pur...
