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.
{"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}
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.
{"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}
Measuring the “True” Quality by Rival Bidder Qualities in Score Auctions In a procurement auction, where price and quality are evaluated by a score, the assessment criteria partially account for the “true” quality offered. The joint information of all the bids can increase the reliability of the measurement process of quality, giving better accuracy of estimation compared with the reported quality. In “Technical Note―Bidding in Multidimensional Auctions When the Qualities of All Bidders Matter,” Lorentziadis examines auctions where the score is adjusted by the qualities of all bidders, who exhibit different production efficiencies and additive separable costs. At equilibrium, the total procurement cost remains the same in the first-score and the second-score auctions. For different adjustments of the score—for example, using a weighted average of all the qualities—we find that the standard unadjusted score auction brings the highest total project cost to the buyer. Procurement managers should give consideration to score rules that account for all bidder qualities.
{"title":"Technical Note - Bidding in Multidimensional Auctions When the Qualities of All Bidders Matter","authors":"Panos L. Lorentziadis","doi":"10.1287/opre.2022.2378","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2378","url":null,"abstract":"Measuring the “True” Quality by Rival Bidder Qualities in Score Auctions In a procurement auction, where price and quality are evaluated by a score, the assessment criteria partially account for the “true” quality offered. The joint information of all the bids can increase the reliability of the measurement process of quality, giving better accuracy of estimation compared with the reported quality. In “Technical Note―Bidding in Multidimensional Auctions When the Qualities of All Bidders Matter,” Lorentziadis examines auctions where the score is adjusted by the qualities of all bidders, who exhibit different production efficiencies and additive separable costs. At equilibrium, the total procurement cost remains the same in the first-score and the second-score auctions. For different adjustments of the score—for example, using a weighted average of all the qualities—we find that the standard unadjusted score auction brings the highest total project cost to the buyer. Procurement managers should give consideration to score rules that account for all bidder qualities.","PeriodicalId":19546,"journal":{"name":"Oper. Res.","volume":"35 1","pages":"1250-1259"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89936668","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}
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.
{"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}
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.
{"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}
Hossein Piri, W. T. Huh, Steven M. Shechter, D. Hudson
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.
{"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}
Costis Maglaras, M. Scarsini, Dongwook Shin, Stefano Vaccari
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.
{"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}
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.
{"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}
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.
{"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}
Patient demand for emergency medical services has never been greater. In the United States, as fewer people access medical care through a primary care provider, more people access care through the hospital emergency department (ED). Unlike other types of queuing systems, however, the ED allows physicians discretion in whom they serve. That is, ED queues do not operate solely under a policy of “first-come, first-served, by severity.” Therefore, we wanted to know: “What leads physicians to select which patients, and how many patients, they will treat?” We explore how familiarity between peer physicians affects patient selection and the chosen multitasking level, a process more commonly known in the ED as “patient pick-up.” We find greater familiarity leads to an increase in patient pick-up rate, observed multitasking, and shorter patient wait time, with no identifiable negative impact to patient processing time or length of stay.
{"title":"Physician Discretion and Patient Pick-up: How Familiarity Encourages Multitasking in the Emergency Department","authors":"R. Niewoehner, KC DiwasSingh, B. Staats","doi":"10.1287/opre.2022.2350","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2350","url":null,"abstract":"Patient demand for emergency medical services has never been greater. In the United States, as fewer people access medical care through a primary care provider, more people access care through the hospital emergency department (ED). Unlike other types of queuing systems, however, the ED allows physicians discretion in whom they serve. That is, ED queues do not operate solely under a policy of “first-come, first-served, by severity.” Therefore, we wanted to know: “What leads physicians to select which patients, and how many patients, they will treat?” We explore how familiarity between peer physicians affects patient selection and the chosen multitasking level, a process more commonly known in the ED as “patient pick-up.” We find greater familiarity leads to an increase in patient pick-up rate, observed multitasking, and shorter patient wait time, with no identifiable negative impact to patient processing time or length of stay.","PeriodicalId":19546,"journal":{"name":"Oper. Res.","volume":"15 1","pages":"958-978"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85177912","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：