2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting Program

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INFORMS Nashville – 2016
157
MB26
110B-MCC
Assignment and Matching Markets
Invited: Auctions
Invited Session
Chair: Thayer Morrill, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC,
United States,
1 - Which School Assignments Are Legal?
Thayer Morrill, North Carolina State University,
A plaintiff must demonstrate that actions caused her harm and that this harm is
redressable in order to have legal standing. We define a set of assignments to be
legal if whenever a student is harmed (has justified envy) there is no legal
assignment where she is assigned to that school (her harm is not redressable). We
show that for any school assignment problem, there is a unique set of legal
assignments; the set of legal assignment is a superset of the assignments that
eliminate justified envy; but the Lattice Theorem, Decomposition Lemma, and
Rural Hospital Theorem all hold. Moreover, there is a unique, Pareto efficient,
legal assignment: the assignment made by Kesten’s EADA when all students
consent.
2 - School Choice Under Partial Fairness
Umut Dur, North Carolina State University,
A recent trend in school choice suggests that districts are willing to violate certain
types of priorities in order to improve students’ welfare. We generalize the school
choice problem by allowing such violations. We characterize the set of efficient
outcomes for a school choice problem in this setting. We introduce a class of
algorithms, denoted Student Exchange under Partial Fairness (SEPF), which
guarantees to find a constrained efficient matching for any problem. Any efficient
matching which improves upon a stable matching can be obtained via an
algorithm within the SEPF class. We offer two applications, each corresponding to
a different interpretation of priority violations.
3 - Optimization In Team Formation
Hoda Atef-Yekta, University of Connecticut,
In this talk we discuss a binary quadratic programming formulation for team-
formation problems. We develop a column generation scheme which provides
orders of magnitude speedups over existing algorithms, and compare the
solutions obtained with those found by existing mechanisms on measures of
efficiency, fairness, stability, and the effect of strategic behavior.
MB27
201A-MCC
Empirical Research in Operations
Sponsored: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt
Sponsored Session
Chair: Antonio Moreno-Garcia, Kellogg School of Management,
2001 Sheridan Rd, Evanston, IL, 60208, United States,
1 - Regulation And Efficiency In Government Procurement:
A Regression Discontinuity Approach
Juan Camilo Serpa, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada,
Ruomeng Cui, Eduard Calvo
We study the effect of public regulation on contracting efficiency in the U.S.,
where efficiency is measured through delay times and budget overruns. To
explore this effect, we use data from 12 million procurement contracts from the
federal government, and exploit a natural experiment introduced Federal
Acquisition Streamlining Act (FASA).
2 - On The Competitive And Collaborative Implications Of
Category Captainship
Yasin Alan, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, United States,
, Jeffrey P Dotson,
Mumin Kurtulus
We empirically examine the impact of a category captainship implementation
performed by a large U.S. grocer on various parties involved, including the
retailer, the captain, and the competing manufacturers. Our findings verify some
of the hypotheses developed in the relevant theoretical literature and refute
others.
3 - The Effects Of Menu Costs On Operational Efficiency In Retail
Yannis Stamatopoulos, McCombs School of Business, Austin, TX,
United States,
Antonio Moreno-Garcia, Achal Bassamboo
It is well-documented that retail prices exhibit a certain degree of inertia. That is,
prices often do not immediately respond to changes in demand and/or cost
conditions. To explain this phenomenon, economists have employed the notion
of menu costs, which summarize all price adjustment costs faced by firms (e.g.,
the costs of printing and distributing price tags). We empirically study the effect of
menu costs on operational efficiency in retail.
4 - The Value Of Fit Information In Online Retail: Evidence From A
Randomized Field Experiment
Santiago Gallino, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH,
, Antonio Moreno-Garcia
By implementing a series of randomized field experiments, we study the value of
virtual fit information in online retail. Customers are randomly assigned to a
treatment condition where virtual fit information is available or to a control
condition where virtual fit information is not available. Our results show that
offering virtual fit information increases conversion, basket sizes, average price of
purchased products, and revisits to the site, while reducing fulfillment costs
arising from returns and home try-on behavior.
MB28
201B-MCC
New Models for Pricing
Sponsored: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt
Sponsored Session
Chair: Gustavo Vulcano, NYU, 44 West Fourth St, New York, NY,
10012, United States,
1 - The Theory Of Large-scale Bundle Size Pricing
Tarek Abdallah, New York University, New York, NY, United States,
Arash Asadpour, Joshua Reed
Bundle size pricing (BSP) is a non-traditional multi-dimensional selling
mechanism where the seller prices the size of the bundle rather than the different
possible combinations of bundles. In BSP, the seller offers the customer a menu of
different sizes and prices. The customer then chooses the size that maximizes his
surplus and customizes his bundle accordingly. We present a theoretical
framework to analyze the large scale BSP problem. We show that, in the presence
of a homogeneous population of consumers, as the number of items grows large,
the optimal BSP is to offer a single size which depends on the consumers’ budgets
and the marginal costs.
2 - Coordinating Supply And Demand On An On-demand Service
Platform: Price, Wage, And Commission Rate
Jiaru Bai, University of California- Irvine, Irvine, CA, 92617,
United States, Kut C So, Christopher S Tang,
Hai Wang, Xiqun Chen
We study an on-demand service platform with heterogeneous customers and
independent service providers. Customers are sensitive to both price and waiting
time for the service, and service providers decide to participate in the platform
based on their own reservation wage rates. The platform needs to select the
optimal price and wage rates to maximize its own profit subject to some target
service requirement.
3 - Price Competition With Consumer Price Perception
Dana Popescu, INSEAD,
While e-commerce has made price comparisons across retailers easier, consumers
still have limited ability to search for the best deal on every product all the time.
Most often, consumers form perceptions about the price competitiveness of a
retailer by comparing the distribution of prices for only a subset of items across
different retailers. If they perceive that a retailer has the lowest prices, then
consumers can be inclined to purchase products from that retailer without a
search, depending on the search costs and the expected savings from finding a
better deal. In a market with heterogeneous products and multiple sellers we
analyze the best pricing strategy for a retailer and its implications.
MB28