Informs Annual Meeting 2017

WB24

INFORMS Houston – 2017

WB25

3 - Online Resource Allocation under Partially Learnable Demand Vahideh Manshadi, Yale University, 165 Whitney Ave, Rm 3473, New Haven, CT, 06511, United States, vahideh.manshadi@yale.edu We study a basic online resource allocation problem where stochastic information about demand is unknown a priori, and it can only be partially learned. We design online algorithms that significantly outperform those that do not utilize the partial information, highlighting the value of (even partial) learning in online resource allocation. 4 - Dynamic Recommendation at Checkout under Inventory Constraintconstraint xchen3@stern.nyu.edu, Will Ma, David Simchi-Levi, Linwei Xin This talk is motivated by a new checkout recommendation system at Walmart’s online grocery, which offers a customer an assortment of up to 8 items that can be added to an existing order, at potentially discounted prices. We formalize this as an online assortment planning problem under limited inventory. Multiple item prices, combined with customer withdrawal when their initially selected items stock out, pose additional challenges for the development of an effective online policy. We overcome these challenges by introducing the notion of an inventory protection level in expectation, and present an online algorithm with bounded competitive ratio for arbitrary arrival sequences. 342F Innovative Practices in Hotel and Sports Revenue Management Sponsored: Revenue Management & Pricing Sponsored Session Chair: Pelin Pekgun, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29205, United States, Pelin.Pekgun@moore.sc.edu Co-Chair: Ovunc Yilmaz, University of Notre Dame, Mendoza College of Business, Columbia, SC, 29201, United States, oyilmaz@email.sc.edu 1 - Dynamic Availability and Pricing of Time-limited Upgrade Offers Xiao Zhang, The University of Texas at Dallas, 800 West Campbell Rd, Richardson, TX, 75080, United States, xiao.zhang@utdallas.edu, Metin Cakanyildirim, Ozalp Ozer Upgrade, a strategy used in the travel industry to balance supply-demand mismatches among products of different quality levels, is usually implemented either at the booking time or at the check-in time. We study a revenue management problem of a firm that sells two products at fixed prices and offers upgrades dynamically. The optimal policy specifies the timing, the pricing, and the quantity of the dynamic upgrades. 2 - The Effects of Peer Reviews and Manager Responses on the Hotel Ratings Saram Han, 110 Joanne Dr., Ithaca, NY, 14850, United States, sh2322@cornell.edu This study examines how the interaction between the members of the TripAdvisor community affects the ratings of future review writers. Specifically, using the peer-effect model, we aim to examine both peer reviews and manager responses’ influence on a future reviewer’s rating. The effect of the reviews are captured at two different points: 1) before booking the hotel, and 2) during the review-writing process. We examine how the information received at the expectation stage affects the evaluation about the hotel. The effect of the peer reviews is also analyzed by different contributor levels. Lastly, we discuss the effect of manager responses regarding their response style. 3 - An Empirical Look at the Team-specific Ticket Options Market? Guangzhi Shang, Florida State University, Department of Marketing, College of Business, Tallahassee, FL, 32306, United States, gshang@fsu.edu, Ovunc Yilmaz, Mark Ferguson, Pelin Pekgun Team-specific ticket options, where fans can make a team-specific reservation for the right and obligation to purchase a face value ticket if their team qualifies for the final game, has recently gained popularity in the sports industry. Over the past two years, a significant portion of the College Football National Championship game tickets was allocated to Teamtix, a company offering these options. In this study, we investigate the drivers of prices and transaction volumes in Teamtix’s marketplace using their Twitter feed and detailed game/ranking information. Xi Chen, New York University, 44 W. 4th St, NYU. KMC Room 8-50, New York, NY, 10012, United States, WB24

350A Innovation/Entrepreneurship Contributed Session Chair: Xiaojin Liu, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States, liux@darden.virginia.edu 1 - How Does the Entrepreneur with Shortages Evaluate the Hidden Market? Sinan Erzurumlu, Associate Professor, Babson College, 231 Forest St, Babson Park, MA, 02457, United States, serzurumlu@babson.edu, Ethem Canakoglu, Yaman Erzurumlu When entrepreneurs evaluate a business opportunity, they assess its value, and the value of the business based on internal factors, including their risk preference and shortages of resources, routines, reputation and regulations along with external factors including market-related uncertainties. These internal and external factors may impede the entrepreneur’s ability to directly evaluate the true state of the market for a business opportunity; hence the market is considered ‘hidden’. We present a Markov decision process model to evaluate the hidden market for the business opportunity. We provide an algorithm that explains how entrepreneurs can implement a market-evaluation procedure. 2 - CEO Duality Leadership, Security Analysts Feedback and Corporate Research and Development Investments Jacob Do-Hyung Cha, Seoul National University, Room 313, 58-dong, Seoul National University, Gwanak-gu, 150-742, Korea, Republic of, research.dohyung@gmail.com, Hye-Jin Cho A commonly held view is that a hazardous short-termism has taken hold across the publicly held firms. Critics say that top managers have become myopic due to capital market pressures. This study examines whether CEO duality leadership can mitigate this myopic behavior in the context of corporate R&D investments under the pressures from the capital market intermediaries - securities analysts. I propose that CEO duality tend to cut R&D investments when the CEO faces the pressures from the capital market which is consistent with the agency theorists. I test this hypothesis by a large-scale, cross-industry data from a sample of U.S. manufacturing firms during the period of 1992 to 2014. 3 - Innovation in a Dynamic Technology Landscape Kibae Kim, Research Assistant Professor, KAIST, Daehakro 291, Yuseong, Daejeon, 34191, Korea, Republic of, kibaejjang@kaist.ac.kr, Jorn Altmann Although previous studies suggest innovation strategies on the ground of technology recombination in a technology landscape, they do not discuss two restricting assumptions that exist in their analysis: the technology space is (1) compact and (2) invariant. In this research we replace these assumptions with realistic ones by redefining the technology space at a meta level and admitting the evolution of technology landscape. Based on these assumptions we analyze innovation strategies using patent data, and show the effect of innovation strategies varies according to how the technology landscape evolves. 4 - Technology Convergence and its Market Performance Kibae Kim, Research Assistant Professor, KAIST, Daehakro 291, Yuseong, Daejeon, 34191, Korea, Republic of, kibaejjang@kaist.ac.kr, Wonjoon Kim Although technological convergence is a paradigm of innovation dominating technology advances across a variety of industry sectors, innovation studies have not yet explored the economic impact of convergence patterns. In this research, we examine whether the market performance causes from the combination of pre-existing technologies or the re-use of converged technologies. To do so, we design a knowledge flow network, which consists of technologies and citation relations, to analyze the combination in backward flowings and the reuse in forward ones. Our findings emphasizes both reuse and combination of technologies and the impact of industry sectors. 5 - How does Social Orientation Influence Firm Innovation Xiaojin Liu, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 22903, United States, liux@darden.virginia.edu, Raul Chao, Jared D. Harris Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained momentum as a driver of long term competitiveness. Appling portfolio and resource allocation theory to understand how firms manage funding for CSR projects, this research addresses the questions of whether and how firm social orientation relates to firm innovation. We empirically find that in the long term, both proactive and reactive social orientation can strengthen firm innovation. However, such benefits are moderated by the firm’s technological and business contexts.

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