Informs Annual Meeting Phoenix 2018

INFORMS Phoenix – 2018

TC28a

4 - Need for Speed: The Impact of Website Performance on Online Retailers Nil Karacaoglu, Kellogg School of Management, Evanston, IL, 60201, United States, Santiago Gallino, Antonio Moreno In 2016, total online retail sales reached $402.3 billion. Moreover, 49% of offline transactions are influenced by online channels. As the importance of online channels increased, the cost of webpage performance issues increased as well. In this environment, it is paramount for companies to understand how website performance impacts customer behavior and to determine the right balance between perceived website content quality and website performance. In this paper, we focus on how consumer behavior is affected by the performance of retailers’ website. In particular, we analyze how website speed impacts conversion rates and online channel revenues. 5 - Does Competition Improve Service Quality? The Case of Nursing Homes Where Public and Private Payers Coexist Susan F. Lu, Purdue University, Krannert 441, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, United States, Konstantinos Serfes, Gerard Wedig, Bingxiao Wu Competition plays an ambiguous role in markets for credence goods, where public and private payers coexist. Using nursing home data with a wide range of market structures, we find a U-shaped relationship between competition and service quality when nursing homes serve a mix of private and public segments, and a monotonic relationship when providers only serve the public segment. The outcomes can be explained by the interplay of two opposing effects of competition: the reputation building effect whereby competing firms choose high quality to build a good reputation and the rent extraction effect whereby competition hinders investment for quality improvements by eliminating price premia. Joint Session PSOR/Practice Curated: Pro Bono Analytics Panel Discussion Sponsored: Public Sector OR Sponsored Session Chair: David T. Hunt, Oliver Wyman, Oliver Wyman, Princeton, NJ, 08540, United States 1 - Pro Bono Analytics Panel Session David T. Hunt, Oliver Wyman, One University Square, Suite 100, Princeton, NJ, 08540, United States Pro Bono Analytics (PBA) is an INFORMS program to match analytics professionals who are willing to volunteer their skills with nonprofit organizations that would benefit from analytical techniques. This panel session will begin with a brief description of some actual PBA projects, and will then focus on a discussion by volunteers and Phoenix area nonprofit representatives about the experiences and challenges of introducing analytics solutions into nonprofit organizations. The discussion will include defining the project outcome, overcoming data problems, and implementing the project results. 2 - Using Decision Analysis to Evaluate Fund Raising for a Nonprofit Organization David Krahl, Kromite LLC, 243 N. Union Street, Lambertville, NJ, 08530, United States 3 - Advancing the Analytics Capabilities at a Workforce Development Organization Rozhin Doroudi, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, 02116, United States 4 - Amanda Hope Rainbow Angels Susan Santilena, Amanda Hope Rainbow Angels, Phoenix, AZ, United States 5 - St. Mary’s Food Bank Marcos J. Gaucin, St. MaryÆs Food Bank Alliance, Phoenix, AZ, United States n TC27 North Bldg 132B

n TC28 North Bldg 221A Non-Monetary Mechanisms for Resource Allocation Sponsored: Applied Probability Sponsored Session Chair: Siddhartha Banerjee, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, United States Co-Chair: Artur Gorokh, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14850, United States 1 - Bargaining and Maxmin Fairness Anilesh Krishnaswamy, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, United States, Ashish Goel While maxmin fairness is a well-known notion of fairness in many resource allocation problems, there is no known mechanism for its implementation in the standard bargaining setting. We construct a mechanism that implements the maxmin fair solution as the unique subgame perfect equilibrium in the n-player bargaining problem. We use the standard assumption, motivated in part by resource allocation problems, that any player can grab the entire surplus. Our mechanism consists of a binary game tree, with each node corresponding to a subgame where the players are allowed to choose between two outcomes. Our design crucially depends on novel combinatorial properties of the maxmin fair solution. 2 - Multi-agent Mechanism Design Without Money Huseyin Gurkan, Duke University, Fuqua School of Business, P.O. Box:337, Durham, NC, 27708, United States, Santiago Balseiro, Peng Sun We consider a principal repeatedly allocating a single resource in each period to one of multiple agents, whose values are private, without relying on monetary payments over an infinite horizon with discounting. We design a dynamic mechanism without monetary transfers, which induces agents to report their values truthfully in each period via promises/threats of future favorable/unfavorable allocations. We show that our mechanism asymptotically achieves the first-best efficient allocation (the welfare-maximizing allocation as if values are public) as agents become more patient and provide sharp characterizations of convergence rates to first best as a function of the discount factor. 3 - Dynamic Proportional Sharing: A Game-theoretic Approach Seyed Majid Zahedi, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States When agents pool their resources, each becomes entitled to a portion of the pool. In this talk, we show that mechanisms based on max-min fail to guarantee entitlements, strategy-proofness (SP) or both. We propose the flexible lending mechanism and show that it satisfies SP and guarantees at least half of the utility from static allocations while providing an asymptotic efficiency guarantee. Our results show that the performance of our mechanism is comparable to that of state-of-the-art mechanisms, providing agents with at least 0.98x, and on average 15x, of their utility from static allocations. Finally, we propose the T-period mechanism and prove that it guarantees SP and entitlements. 4 - Non-Monetary Mechanism Design via Artificial Currencies Artur Gorokh, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14850, United States, Siddhartha Banerjee, Krishnamurthy Iyer Non-monetary mechanisms for repeated resource allocation are gaining widespread use in many real-world settings. Our aim in this work is to study the allocative efficiency and incentive properties of simple repeated mechanisms based on artificial currencies. Our main result in this framework is a general black-box technique to convert any static monetary mechanism to a dynamic mechanism with artificial currency, that simultaneously guarantees vanishing loss in efficiency, and vanishing gains from non-truthful bidding over time. n TC28a Foyer, North Bldg 221 RAS Poster Session Sponsored: Railway Applications Sponsored Session Chair: Andy Yoon, Norfolk Southern Corporation, Norfolk Southern Corporation, Suwanee, GA, 30024, United States 1 - RAS Poster Session Andy Yoon, Norfolk Southern Corporation, 867 Village Manor Pl, Suwanee, GA, 30024, United States The RAS poster session provides an interactive way to share knowledge and state- of-the-art research in railroad applications. Poster presenters will have the opportunity to show case research or projects that are at early stages of development, and benefit from the interactive critique, suggestions, and encouragement from colleagues working in the area of railroad business analytics and optimization.

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