Informs Annual Meeting Phoenix 2018

INFORMS Phoenix – 2018

MD55

often develop a new capability that may find voice in a range of industrial settings. However, the team may lack the marketing budget to explore each in great depth, or even all of them at any depth. We formulate a bandit model to study this problem and develop a novel approach to its resolution, which includes simulation, interpretation, communication and implementation of search strategies. 2 - Effect of Flexibility on Consumption of Services Rajiv Mukherjee, Southern Methodist University, 11113 New Orleans Dr, Frisco, TX, 75035, United States, Sreekumar R. Bhaskaran, Sanjiv Erat In this paper, we experimentally investigate how flexibility in consumption interacts with the actual usage of a service by consumers. Subsequently, we study a firm’s pricing and capacity planning decision under the presence of these effects. The results have interesting implications in industries where managing congestion is an important consideration. 3 - The Effects of Mental Accounting on Project Management and Performance Yael S. Grushka-Cockayne, Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, 100 Darden Boulevard, Charlottesville, VA, 22903, United States, Manel Baucells, Woonam Hwang We consider a project manager who decides on the budget and the scope of a project, and must react to news as the project evolves, possibly revising the cost and scope. The project manager is likely to compare ongoing cost and scope to a baseline. When costs and benefits are dissociated in time—-as is the case of a project—-such comparisons give rise to a mental accounting process where costs and benefits are either mentally banked or amortized. We develop a stylized model capturing this process, and investigate the impact of loss aversion, reference-point updating, and narrow framing on a project manager’s decisions and the project’s financial performance. 4 - From Noise to Bias in Linked Supply Chain Decisions Jordan D. Tong, University of Wisconsin Madison, 975 University Ave, Room 4293, Madison, WI, 53706, United States, Daniel Feiler We complement BOM research on random error by studying how noisy behavior plays out in linked decisions. In the choose-forecast-invest task combination, one must (a) choose which product to sell (b) make a demand forecast for the chosen product and (c) make an investment decision for the chosen product. Through behavioral models and lab experiments, we show how adding unbiased random noise to the process leads to systematic overinvestment. This bias arises due to the way that random noise filters through the linked decisions and statistical naivety on the part of the decision-maker. We show how some kinds of noise reduce the bias while others actually mitigate it, and test a debiasing technique. n MD55 North Bldg 232C Getting Funded by NSF: Proposal Preparation and the Merit Review Process Emerging Topic: NSF Emerging Topic Session Chair: Irina Dolinskaya, National Science Foundation, 2415 Eisenhower Ave, Alexandria, VA, 22314, United States 1 - Getting Funded by NSF: Proposal Preparation and the Merit Review Process Irina Dolinskaya, National Science Foundation, 2415 Eisenhower Ave, Alexandria, VA, 22314, United States So, you think you have a great research idea, now how do you get funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to do the work? A well-scoped and written proposal is instrumental to successful submission. This session targets junior faculty and researchers who might be new to NSF and describes detailed guidelines and practical advice for proposal preparation. The presenters will go over NSF review process and Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts criteria, as well as share most common mistakes made by the PIs when submitting a proposal. Question-and-answer session will follow the presentation.

n MD53 North Bldg 232A Market Design Sponsored: Auction and Marketing Design Sponsored Session Chair: Itai Ashlagi, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, United States 1 - Centralized Admissions for Engineering Colleges in India Yash Kanoria, Columbia Business School, 404 Uris Hall, New York, NY, 10027, United States, Surender Baswana, Partha Pratim Chakrabarti, Sharat Chandran, Utkarsh Patange We designed and implemented a new joint seat allocation process for over 500 programs across 80 engineering colleges in India, including the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Our Deferred Acceptance-based process overcomes a number of challenges. The joint seat allocation process has been successfully running since 2015, with a 70% reduction in vacancies at the IITs. Particular concerns have been (i) allocative efficiency and reducing vacancies due to students accepting a seat but then withdrawing or not reporting for classes, (ii) transparency, integrity and fairness, (iii) logistical simplicity for both candidates and institutes, and (iv) the incentive structure for candidates. 2 - On the Competition Complexity of Dynamic Mechanism Design Christos-Alexandros Psomas, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, GHC 9116, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, United States, Siqi Liu Consider the following problem: a monopolist is auctioning off m items in m consecutive stages to n interested buyers. A buyer realizes her value for item k in the beginning of stage k. How many additional buyers are necessary and sufficient for a second price auction at each stage to extract revenue at least that of the optimal dynamic auction? We prove that the number of additional buyers, i.e. the Competition Complexity, is at most 3n - and at least linear in n - even when the buyers’ values are correlated across stages, under a monotone hazard rate assumption on the stage (marginal) distributions. 3 - Repeated Sales for Multiple Strategic Buyers Emmanouil Pountourakis, University of Texas at Austin, 16 Bristol Street, Unit 3, Cambridge, MA, 02141, United States, Nicole Immorlica, Brendan Lucier, Sam Taggart In a market with repeated sales of a single item to a single buyer, prior work has established the existence of a zero revenue perfect Bayesian equilibrium in the absence of a commitment device for the seller. We show that in fact almost any revenue can be achieved in equilibrium, but the zero revenue equilibrium uniquely survives natural refinements. However, this market failure depends crucially on the assumption of a single buyer. If there are multiple buyers, we construct an intuitive equilibrium for multiple buyers that survives our refinements, in which the seller obtains a constant factor of the per-round Myerson optimal revenue.. 4 - Maximizing Efficiency in Dynamic Matching Markets Maximilien Burq, PhD Student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States, Itai Ashlagi, Patrick Jaillet, Amin Saberi We study the finite horizon problem of matching agents who arrive at a marketplace over time and leave after d time periods. Each pair of agents can yield a different match value, and we study matching algorithms that perform well over arbitrary arrivals. Our main contribution is a 1/4-competitive algorithm which randomly selects a subset of agents who will wait until right before their departure to get matched, and maintains a maximum-weight matching with respect to the other agents. We extend the model to the case with stochastic departures, and establish a 1/8-competitive algorithm in this setting. Finally we show on real-world data that a modified version of our algorithm performs well in practice. New Areas in Behavioral Operations Sponsored: Behavioral Operations Management Sponsored Session Chair: Evgeny Kagan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48103, United States 1 - Entrepreneurial Market Research - When Hypotheses Outnumber Samples Evgeny Kagan, University of Michigan, Ross School of Business, 701 Tappan Ave, Ross School of Business, Office R5425, Ann Arbor, MI, 48103, United States, Stephen Leider, William S. Lovejoy In “technology-push” (relative to “demand-pull”) innovation, technology teams n MD54 North Bldg 232B

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