2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting Program

SC26

INFORMS Nashville – 2016

2 - Markets For Technology And The Technological Trajectories Of Entrepreneurial Startups Mahka Moeen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, 03, United States, mahka_moeen@kenan-flagler.unc.edu Seth Carnahan This paper focuses on how entrepreneurial startups shape their opportunity set for participation in the market for technology, by pursuing investments that increase their attractiveness as a technology seller. Because startups in technological proximity to a technology buyer may be considered favorable technology sellers, we suggest that investment by potential buyers in a technical domain is likely to spur investments by startups in the same or proximate domains. We further examine the moderating effects of the direction of scientific progress, commercial applicability, and density of the buyer’s alliance portfolio. The empirical context is plant biotechnology field experiments. 3 - The Entrepreneurial Process: Evidence From A Nationally Representative Survey Aaron Chatterji, Duke University, Faqua School of Business, 100 Fuqua Drive, Durham, NC, 27708, United States, ronnie@duke.edu, Victor Bennett Using data from a new nationally representative survey of Americans, we document patterns in the process of firm entry via entrepreneurship. Only 1/3 of our respondents have even considered starting a business, motivated in the vast majority of cases by non-pecuniary concerns rather than the pursuit of significant market opportunities. Fewer than half of those who considered starting a business take even the lowest cost steps, like searching the Internet for potential competitors or speaking with a friend. This surprising lack of progress is evident in comparison to nationally representative evidence on job search activities. 4 - Venture Capital Investment Strategies Under Financing Constraints: Evidence From The 2008 Financial Crisis Annamaria Conti, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, United States, annamaria.conti@scheller.gatech.edu Stuart Graham, Nishant Dass Employing the 2008 financial crisis as an empirical setting, we examine the investment strategies of venture capitalists (VCs) in response to liquidity supply shocks. While predictably VCs reduce investment, we show that VCs reposition by increasing their share of, and per-round funding to, startups operating in the VCs’ core sectors. These effects are driven by more-experienced VCs, and are strongest in early-stage portfolio startups. Consistently, we find superior ex-post performance among crisis-funded portfolio startups operating in more- experienced VCs’ core sectors. Our findings point to more-experienced VCs possessing information advantages, especially in their core sectors. SC25 110A-MCC Latest Developments in Scheduling Research Invited: Project Management and Scheduling Invited Session Chair: Zhi-Long Chen, Professor, University of Maryland, Van Munching Hall, College Park, MD, 20742, United States, zchen@rhsmith.umd.edu 1 - A Polyhedral Study Of The Physician Scheduling Problem With Equalization Constraints Pelin Damci-Kurt, Lightning Bolt Solutions, South San Francisco, CA, United States, pelin@lightning-bolt.com, Minjiao Zhang We study a physician scheduling problem in which the goal is to minimize the penalties associated with different requirements over a finite horizon. The problem is divided and solved in two phases according to penalty values. We focus on a relaxation including assignment demand and equalization constraints. We present a class of valid inequalities, and report preliminary computational experiments with them in a branch-and-cut algorithm on our client data sets. 2 - Models For Workforce Scheduling In A Union Shop John Mittenthal, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, 35487, United States, jmittent@cba.ua.edu, Minjiao Zhang We develop an assignment problem model for worker to job assignments that deviates as little as possible from a shift supervisor’s allocation of these workers. These deviations occur due to worker absences. In addition to validating the model over four weeks of data, we investigate a number of what-if questions.

3 - An Integrated Production Scheduling And Outbound Vehicle Routing Problem Kunpeng Li, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, likp@hust.edu.cn In this integrated production scheduling and vehicle routing problem, there is a single machine for production and limited vehicles with capacity constraints for transportation. The objective is to determine the decisions about production scheduling, transportation batching and vehicle routing, to minimize the maximum order delivery time. Based on an optimal property for production scheduling and transportation batching, backward and forward batching methods are developed, which are embedded into an improved genetic algorithm. The results show that the genetic algorithm can provide high quality solutions, compared with a two-stage algorithm and a published genetic algorithm. 4 - Integrated Production, Inventory And Distribution Problems Zhi-Long Chen, University of Maryland, zchen@rhsmith.umd.edu Feng Li, Lixin Tang We consider several integrated production, inventory and delivery problems that arise in practical settings where customer orders have pre-specified delivery time windows and are first processed in a plant and then delivered to the customers by transporters that have fixed delivery departure times. The objective is to find an integrated schedule for processing the orders, keeping finished orders in inventory if necessary, and delivering them to the customers such that the total inventory and delivery cost is minimum. We study complexity and propose algorithms for various problems. For the two most general problems, we propose combined column generation and tabu search heuristic algorithms. Invited: Auctions Invited Session Chair: Sasa Pekec, Duke University, 100 Fuqua Drive, Durham, NC, 27708-0120, United States, pekec@duke.edu 1 - Stable Matchings With Proportionality Constraints Thanh Nguyen, Purdue University, nguye161@purdue.edu, Rakesh Vinay Vohra In designing two sided markets, a stable matching is often desired to satisfy certain additional side constraints. Current literature has mainly focused on constraints where the relevant “right hand sides” are absolute numbers specified a-priori; before agents on the “proposing” side make their participation decisions. There is a danger, then, of over constraining the problem. It is sometimes more natural to express the relevant constraints as proportions. We develop a framework to obtain stable matchings that almost satisfy floor and ceiling proportional side constraints. Our results are based on a generalization of Scarf’s We consider a setting where a buyer procures up to D units of a homogeneous good (e.g. a medical drug) but needs to satisfy a hard budget constraint of spending at most B in total payments. Furthermore, the buyer faces suppliers with privately known costs. We characterize the optimal procurement mechanism as well as new simple mechanisms (which are at least as good as the second price auction with reservation price) that are easy to implement via a sequential auction. In particular we highlight how the budget constrain fundamentally alters the structure of the optimal mechanism. 3 - Robust Bidding Policies Sasa Pekec, Duke University, pekec@duke.edu We study the best-response decision problem of an auction bidder who wants to maximize her worst-case payoff, while facing uncertainty about rivals’ objectives and bids. The information about rivals is modeled via an uncertainty set consisting of all possible realizations of rivals’ bids. Maximizing the bidder’s worst- case payoff over this set yields robust bidding policies that do not depend on distributional assumptions. Robust bidding policies are constructed for several multi-item auction formats, depending on how supply (homogeneous or heterogeneous items) and demand (unit-demand or multiple-demand bidders) is handled. SC26 110B-MCC Auction Design Topics lemma, which is of independent interest. 2 - Budget-constrained Procurement Alexandre Belloni, Duke University, abn5@duke.edu Giuseppe Lopomo, Leslie Marx, Roberto Steri

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