2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting Program

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INFORMS Nashville – 2016
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3 - Optimal Auctions With Restricted Allocations
Ian Kash, Microsoft,
We study the design of optimal auctions under restrictions on the set of
allocations. In addition to allowing us to restrict to deterministic mechanisms, we
can also indirectly model non-additive valuations. We prove a strong duality
result, extending a result due to Daskalakis et al. [2015], that guarantees the
existence of a certificate of optimality for optimal restricted mechanisms. As a
corollary, we provide a new characterization of the allocations that the optimal
mechanism may use. We find and certify optimal mechanisms for four settings
where previous frameworks do not apply and provide new economic intuition
about some of the tools that have previously been used to find optimal
mechanisms.
4 - Sample Complexity Of Revenue Maximization In The Hierarchy Of
Deterministic Combinatorial Auctions
Tuomas Sandholm, Carnegie Mellon University,
, Nina Balcan, Ellen Vitercik
Designing revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions (CAs) is elusive. It is
typically assumed that the designer knows the prior distribution over valuations,
which is unrealistic because the prior is doubly exponential. Sandholm and
Likhodedov introduced automated mechanism design that takes as input samples
from the prior, and searches for a high-revenue CA within rich auction classes.
There was no formal characterization of the number of samples required to
guarantee that the CA revenue on the samples is close to its revenue on the
underlying prior. We fill that gap, providing tight sample complexity bounds over
the hierarchy of deterministic CA classes, and uncover structural properties.
MC27
201A-MCC
Organizational Learning and Problem Solving
Strategies in Service Organizations
Sponsored: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt
Sponsored Session
Chair: Anita L Tucker, Brandeis, 415 South Street, MS 032, Waltham,
MA, 02453-2728, United States,
1 - Checklists In Aviation And Healthcare
Roger E Bohn, University of California-San Diego,
Checklists in health care are often motivated by citing their use in aviation. But
aviation struggled with checklists and standardization for decades. Craft-based
pilots were often better than pilots who used standard procedures. Combining the
benefits of both centralized explicit knowledge and individual tacit knowledge is
still not fully solved. Medicine will have similar tradeoffs, and needs a flexible and
learning-centered approach to checklists and other procedural knowledge.
2 - The Moderating Role Of Organizational Context On
Learning-by-doing
Bradley R Staats, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
In this paper, we examine relatedness from a strategic perspective. We consider
one aspect of strategic relatedness that is particularly salient at all levels of
analysis: goals. In doing so, we argue that even where otherwise diverse activities
are knowledge-related, if they are not goal-related, learning-by-doing is likely to
suffer. Using data from the hospital industry our findings suggest that goal-
relatedness is an important consideration when it comes to learning. Although
goal-related teaching aids learning-by-doing in clinical care, we find that strong
academic affiliations (and the research-oriented tasks and goals they bring with
them) may detract from it.
3 - Impact Of Tightly-coupled Team Familiarity And Learning-curve
Heterogeneity On Orthopedic Procedure Times
Michael A Lapre, Vanderbilt University,
, David W Moore
We study team familiarity and learning-curve heterogeneity in the context of
orthopedic surgery times. We find that learning from team experience depends on
familiarity between team members who have to closely coordinate their tasks.
When we allow for learning-curve heterogeneity for individual and tightly-
coupled team experience, organizational experience is no longer significant. This
finding suggests that organizational experience could be a proxy for individuals
and teams learning at different rates.
4 - Integration And Quality Performance In Hospitals
Eitan Naveh, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa,
Israel, Wiljeana Glover, Qing Li,
Michael Gross
While many studies suggest that integration is positively associated with improved
quality of care, others assert that integration may not necessarily result in better
quality of care. The inconsistent success of integration to improve performance is
not limited to healthcare operations, but in operations and engineering
management in general. We suggest that this inconsistency exists due to the
predominant view that does not consider that systems integration requires
consideration of both technical and human components. We use the theory of
Human Systems Integration (HSI) to explain how the technical component and
the human component of a system interact to influence quality performance.
MC28
201B-MCC
New Supply Chain Inventory Problems Motivated by
Practice
Sponsored: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt
Sponsored Session
Chair: Jeannette Song, Duke University, NC, United States,
Co-Chair: Yue Zhang, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States,
1 - Online-retail Inventory Replenishment: A Dynamic
Programming Approach
Stephen C Graves, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, MA, United States,
Annie I-An Chen
An online-retail inventory system consists of fulfillment centers where items are
stored and shipped. Demand can be satisfied by any fulfillment center carrying
the item, but a system-wide stockout results in lost sales. Assuming myopic
fulfillment and joint periodic review, we formulate the online-retail inventory
replenishment problem as a dynamic program. We study the optimal solution
structure and propose near-optimal heuristic policies of tractable complexity,
including base-stock and constant-basestock hybrid policies, which can be found
by simulation optimization methods. Numerical examples demonstrate that our
approach outperforms the status-quo base-stock policy.
2 - Robust Inventory Allocation Under Process Flexibility
He Wang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts
Avenue, E40-130, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States,
David Simchi-Levi, Yehua Wei
We consider a hybrid strategy that combines process flexibility and inventory to
help firms meet uncertain supply with uncertain demand. We propose a robust
optimization framework to model this hybrid strategy, and show that the problem
can be efficiently solved using a cutting-plane algorithm. We then demonstrate
the benefit of this method in practical applications such as supply chain risk
mitigation and production postponement.
3 - Stock Or Print? Impact Of 3D Printing On Critical Spare
Parts Logistics
Yue Zhang, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States,
, Jing-Sheng Jeannette Song
In this paper, we construct a general framework to analyze the impact of 3D
printing in spare part sourcing. Our results provide guidance in how to partition
the spare part service among an oversea supplier and a local 3D printer.
MC29
202A-MCC
Issues in Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
Sponsored: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt,
Sustainable Operations
Sponsored Session
Chair: Mili Mehrotra, University Of Minnesota, 321 19th Ave South,
Minneapolis, MN, 55455, United States,
1 - Operational Response To Climate Change: Do Profitable Carbon
Abatement Opportunities Decrease Over Time?
Christian Blanco, UCLA Anderson School of Management,
Los Angeles, CA, United States,
Felipe Caro, Charles J Corbett
We explore data collected by CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) on
over 11,000 projects implemented by 956 firms. We find that the average payback
period is increasing by about one month for each reporting period, but less so for
firms that pursue opportunities that are directly related to core company
operations.
MC29