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作者：Bai, Xingyu; Chen, Xin; Li, Menglong; Stolyar, Alexander
作者单位：University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; University System of Georgia; Georgia Institute of Technology; City University of Hong Kong; University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
摘要：We consider a generic Markov decision process (MDP) with two controls: one control taking effect immediately and the other control whose effect is delayed by a positive lead time. As the lead time grows, one naturally expects that the effect of the delayed action only weakly depends on the current state, and decoupling the delayed action from the current state could provide good controls. The purpose of this paper is to substantiate this decoupling intuition by establishing asymptotic optimali...
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作者：Maglaras, Costis; Scarsini, Marco; Shin, Dongwook; Vaccarid, Stefano
作者单位：Columbia University; Luiss Guido Carli University; Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
摘要：This paper studies product ranking mechanisms of a monopolistic online platform in the presence of social learning. The products' quality is initially unknown, but consumers can sequentially learn it as online reviews accumulate. A salient aspect of our problem is that consumers, who want to purchase a product from a list of items displayed by the platform, incur a search cost while scrolling down the list. In this setting, the social learning dynamics, and hence the demand, is affected by the...
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作者：Goyal, Vineet; Udwani, Rajan
作者单位：Columbia University; University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：The problem of online matching with stochastic rewards is a generalization of the online bipartitematching problemwhere each edge has a probability of success. When a match is made it succeeds with the probability of the corresponding edge. We consider the more general vertex-weighted version of the problem and give two new results. First, we show that a natural generalization of the perturbed-greedy algorithm is (1 - 1/e) competitive when probabilities decompose as a product of two factors, o...
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作者：Niewoehner, Robert J., III; Diwas, K. C.; Staats, Bradley
作者单位：Indiana University System; IU Kelley School of Business; Indiana University Bloomington; Emory University; University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
摘要：Patient demand for emergency medical services continues to rise from all-time highs. Physicians generally respond to the rising demand by increasing the level of multitasking. What leads emergency department (ED) physicians to select which patients, and how many patients, to treat? Queuing models frequently assume individual servers operate independently of other servers. In contrast, we consider how familiarity between peer physicians affects patient selection and the chosen multitasking leve...
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作者：Zhang, Haixiang; Zheng, Zeyu; Lavaei, Javad
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：We propose new sequential simulation???optimization algorithms for general convex optimization via simulation problems with high-dimensional discrete decision space. The performance of each choice of discrete decision variables is evaluated via stochastic simulation replications. If an upper bound on the overall level of uncertainties is known, our proposed simulation???optimization algorithms utilize the discrete convex structure and are guaranteed with high probability to find a solution tha...
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作者：Long, Zhenghua; Zhang, Hailun; Zhang, Jiheng; Zhang, Zhe George
作者单位：Nanjing University; 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：Liu, Jiayi; Diwas, K. C.
作者单位：Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University; Emory University
摘要：Patient no-shows for scheduled medical appointments are of great concern for many healthcare providers. In this paper, we tackle the no-show problem by applying insights from behavioral science. Specifically, we nudge patients into arriving for their scheduled appointment using text reminders of their upcoming visit. We conduct a field experiment at an outpatient specialty clinic, where we add to the standard message an additional line of text that indicates a potentially long wait for the nex...
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作者：Souyris, Sebastian; Seshadri, Sridhar; Subramanian, Sriram
作者单位：Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
摘要：Advertisement scheduling is a daily essential operational process in the television business. Efficient distribution of viewers among advertisers allows the television network to satisfy contracts and increase ad sale revenues. Ad scheduling is a challenging multiperiod, mixed-integer programming problem in which the network must create schedules to meet advertisers' campaign goals and maximize ad revenues. Each campaign must meet a specific target group of viewers and a unique set of constrai...
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作者：Bertsimas, Dimitris; Delarue, Arthur
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); University System of Georgia; Georgia Institute of Technology
摘要：Getting students to the right school at the right time can pose a challenge for school districts in the United States, which must balance educational objectives with operational ones, often on a shoestring budget. Examples of such operational challenges include deciding which students should attend, how they should travel to school, and what time classes should start. Froman optimizer's perspective, these decision problems are difficult to solve in isolation, and present a formidable challenge...
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作者：Bai, Xingyu; Chen, Xin; Stolyar, Alexander L.
作者单位：University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
摘要：We consider a partially observable lost-sales inventory system, in which the inventory level is observed only when it reaches zero. We use the vanishing discount factor approach to prove the existence of a stationary optimal policy for the average cost minimization. As our main methodological contribution, we provide a way to verify the key condition of the vanishing discount factor approach???the uniform boundedness of the relative discounted value function. To accomplish that, we construct a...
