2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting Program

SA49

INFORMS Nashville – 2016

SA49 211-MCC Case Competition I Sponsored: Education (INFORMED) Sponsored Session Chair: Palaniappa Krishnan, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, United States, baba@udel.edu 1 - Wine Of Kings, King Of Wines David Kopcso, Babson College, Wellesley, MA, United States, kopcso@babson.edu It is a cool October morning and Borbála Bodnar is faced with a dilemma. The harvest at her northeast Hungary vineyard is finishing. Her hopes for a harvest of botrytis-affected, aszu (dried) grapes is waning. The seasonally rainy days are approaching. Bodnar must decide if she should harvest the grapes immediately for a modest profit or wait with the hope of a Botrytis infection. A heavy downpour would swell the already ripe grapes with water producing an inferior wine with little profit while a shower or even just a high humidity day followed a day later by a drop in humidity would be ideal for the development of the Botrytis cinerea fungus needed to produce the very profitable, complex, sweet Tokaji wine. 2 - Risks and Rewards in Professional Tennis Fredrik Odegaard, Western University, London, ON, Canada. fodegaard@ivey.uwo.ca The case centers on the professional tennis tour ATP, and the world-famous and prestigious Grand Slam tournament Wimbledon.Depending on the instructor’s use of the case, the case is suitable in both an introductory and as well as intermediate/advanced management science/analytics course. Although the main target audience is under-graduate business and engineering students, the case is also suitable for Masters students (including MBA). The case has been used both as a casebased final exam and as material for in-class case discussion. 3 - Optimizing Promotions For Supermarkets Using Data Analytics Maxime Cohen, New York University, Stern School of Business, New York, NY, United States, maxcohen@nyu.edu, Georgia Perakis In this case, we expose the students to the issues faced by a supermarket manager seeking to optimize price promotions for a category of products. The students will learn: how to handle data, demand modeling and forecasting, business rules and mathematical modeling, optimization formulation, solving linear programs, and how to measure the practical impact of the approach. The case includes data sets so that the students can experience handling data. The approach encompasses the entire process behind promotion planning, from data collection to optimizing promotion decisions. 4 - Ingenuity Technology-From Chaos To Structured Data William Schmidt, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States, wschmidt@cornell.edu This case will familiarize students with the process of merging together and analyzing data from multiple files. Students will (1) conduct a data integration effort similar to what they may encounter it in a practical setting and (2) perform an analysis on the combined data set. The case is designed such that the tasks can be conducted using a variety of platforms. The setting is a recently founded technology firm that has experienced rapid growth in its first 2 years of operations. The protagonist must decide whether a new sales process has improved the performance of the sales organization. SA50 212-MCC Gender and Diversity-based Research Sponsored: Women in OR, MS Sponsored Session Chair: Sarah G Nurre, University of Arkansas, 4207 Bell Engineering, Fayetteville, AR, 72701, United States, snurre@uark.edu 1 - Evaluations At Every Corner A Discussion Of Bias In The Evaluation Process Tristan Botelho, MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA, United States, tbotelho@mit.edu Evaluations were traditionally handled by experts (e.g., critics, experts, judges), however, over the past 10-15 years, platforms have emerged to facilitate the evaluation process in nearly every domain. Now, any individual or firm has an outlet that they can use to evaluate a candidate, good, or service with a click of a button. Further, the prevalence of these evaluation processes has led to organizations utilizing similar rating systems to evaluate workers, ideas, and strategy. In this talk I review some work on how biases can enter into different stages of the evaluation process affecting evaluation outcomes. I will specifically focus on issues related to social influence, gender, and expertise.

2 - It’s A Man’s Job: Income And The Gender Gap In Industrial Research Myriam Mariani, University, 1, Bocconi, Italy, myriam.mariani@unibocconi.it This study examines differences in income and job performance between women and men in creative jobs tasked with achieving technological inventions. By building on data pertaining to 9,692 inventors from 23 countries, this study shows that female inventors represent only 4.2% of total inventors, and they earn 14% less than their male peers. The gap persists after controlling for sources of heterogeneity, the selection of inventors into types of jobs and tasks, and potential parenthood, instrumented by exploiting religious practices. The income gap is not associated with differences in the quality of the inventions. 3 - An Agenda For Diversity And Inclusion-related Research within OR/MS/Analytics Michael P Johnson, University of Massachusetts Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd, M-3-428A, Department of Public Policy and Public Affairs, Boston, MA, 02124, United States, michael.johnson@umb.edu Diversity and inclusion have been widely studied and debated, most often within the social sciences. What contributions can operations research, management sci- ence and analytics make to this domain of inquiry? This talk will critically exam- ine assumptions and practices within the decision sciences that may support as well impede diversity- and inclusion-related research, and propose a research agenda that can challenge yet enrich our profession. 4 - Bridging The Gap: Optimal Responses To Equal Pay Legislation Margret Bjarnadottir, University of Maryland, R H Smith School, College Park, MD, 20, United States, margret@rhsmith.umd.edu, David Anderson We study how firms can reduce any measured demographic based pay-gap (such as the gender pay gap), in the most cost efficient way possible. We show that by prioritizing wage increases and targeting workers that will have the greatest impact, a manager can meet the Equal Pay for Equal Work standard for less than half the cost of the naive methods. We further formulate a trade-off optimization model that balances the need to close a pay gap with employee fairness, given a fixed budget during the annual review cycle. SA51 213-MCC Applied Humanitarian Operations Management Sponsored: Public Sector OR Sponsored Session Chair: Alfonso J Pedraza-Martinez, Indiana University, 1309 E. 10th Street, Room HH 4100, Bloomington, IN, 47405, United States, alpedraz@indiana.edu 1 - Dynamic Allocation Of NGO Funds Among Program, Fundraising, And Administration Telesilla Kotsi, Indiana university, Bloomington, IN, United States, tkotsi@umail.iu.edu, Goker Aydin, Alfonso Pedraza Martinez NGOs report three types of spending: program spending to deliver services directly to beneficiaries; fundraising spending; and administrative spending. Watchdog organizations give higher ratings to NGOs that allocate more of their budget to the program. However, fundraising and administrative spending are also necessary. Fundraising helps to increase the NGO’s future budget, while administrative spending helps to make future program spending more impactful. We model this trade-off in a dynamic program. One of our results is that NGOs with tight budgets should prioritize fundraising and administration now, so that they are in a better position to make impactful program spending in the future. 2 - Supporting Hurricane Inventory Management Decisions With Consumer Demand Estimates Douglas Morrice, University of Texas Ausitn, Douglas.Morrice@mccombs.utexas.edu, Paul Cronin, Fehmi Tanrisever, John Butler We consider inventory allocation issues faced by a retailer during a hurricane event and provide insights that can be applied to humanitarian operations during slow-onset events. We start with an empirical analysis using regression that triangulates three sources of information: a large point-of-sales data set from a Texas Gulf Coast retailer, the retailer’s operational and logistical constraints, and hurricane forecast data from the National Hurricane Center (NHC). Using the results of the empirical analysis and the NHC forecast data, we construct a demand model and develop an inventory management model to satisfy consumer demand prior to a hurricane making landfall.

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