2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting Program

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INFORMS Nashville – 2016
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MC37
205C-MCC
Socially Responsible Business Models
Sponsored: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt,
Sustainable Operations
Sponsored Session
Chair: Serguei Netessine, INSEAD, Singapore, Singapore,
1 - To Sell And To Provide? The Economic And Environmental
Implications Of The Auto Manufacturer’s Involvement In The
Car Sharing Business
Ioannis Bellos, George Mason University,
Mark Ferguson, Beril L Toktay
Motivated by the involvement of Daimler and BMW in the car sharing business
we consider an OEM who contemplates introducing a car sharing program. The
OEM designs its product line by accounting for the trade-off between driving
performance and fuel efficiency. We determine the efficiency of the vehicles
offered and we characterize the effect on the OEM’s Corporate Average Fuel
Economy (CAFE) along with the economic and environmental implications.
2 - Optimal Allocation Rules With Waste Considerations
Sara Rezaee Vessal, HEC Paris, Jouy en josas, France,
Sam Aflaki, Dimitrios Andritsos
We study capacity allocation of a scarce and perishable product among stockout-
averse retailers that face stochastic demand. We focus on two commonly practiced
allocation mechanisms and using a dynamic model characterize the conditions
under which each allocation mechanism performs superior from a waste and
profit point of view.
3 - Child Labor In Supply Chains: An Empirical Investigation
Sameer Hasija, INSEAD, , Hsiao-Hui Lee,
Niyazi Taneri
Due to increasing globalization, labor malpractices at upstream positions in supply
chains directly or indirectly impact many organizations. Moreover, from a
social/moral perspective poor labor conditions may have long term adverse effects
on society. Lack of visibility in long supply chains hinders our capability in
overcoming such issues. In this paper, we generate empirical insights on the
drivers of labor malpractices, and child labor in particular.
4 - Philanthropic Campaigns And Customer Behavior:
Field Experiments In An Online Taxi Booking Company
Serguei Netessine, INSEAD, 1 Ayer Rajah Avenue, Singapore,
138676, Singapore, Jasjit Singh,
Nina Teng
Companies commonly use philanthropic campaigns to attract and retain
customers in the form of charity-linked promotions, where a company donates
money to a cause when a customer makes a purchase. Customer-related effects of
such promotions remain under-studied, an issue this study investigates using field
experiments in an online taxi booking company. Take-up rates for charity-linked
promotions were smaller than for discount-based promotions, and also less
sensitive to the monetary amount. Although promotion take-up did represent
new bookings rather than substitution of non-promotional bookings, there is little
evidence of an increase in subsequent purchase frequency.
MC38
206A-MCC
Social Media Analysis V
Invited: Social Media Analytics
Invited Session
Chair: Chris Smith, Air Force Institute of Technology, 2950 Hobson
Way, 2950 Hobson Way, Wright-Patterson AFB, OH, 45433, United
States,
1 - App Developers’ Product Offering Strategies In
Multi-platform Markets
Degan Yu, PhD Candidate, University of Rhode Island, Ballentine
Hall, 7 Lippitt Road, Kingston, RI, 02881, United States,
Mobile application (app) developers usually face challenges in deciding product
offering choices. In this research we construct an analytical model for product
offering problem that app and software developers face in a two-platform
environment and the developers offer paid or free app (free app offers
advertisement) in each platform. Our findings shed light on some insights into the
business practices in industries including mobile apps, computer software, and
social media games.
2 - Positive Impact Of Graphical Visualization Of Discussion Forums
On Collaborative Learning
Jacqueline Ng, Northwestern University, 2145 Sheridan Road,
C-230, Evanston, IL, 60208, United States,
Seyed Iravani
Widespread internet connectivity has increased the popularity of online delivery
of course content. With the rise of online courses, e.g., MOOCs, there is an
increasing need to create opportunities for learners to interact and exchange
ideas. Dynamic online discussion forums can accomplish these goals. We use
visualization techniques to design a novel graphical interface for discussion
forums that presents posts as nodes and replies as edges connecting nodes. By
comparing the effectiveness of graphical and text-based discussion forums, we
find that the graphical interface promotes higher levels of both activity and
interactivity, creating increased engagement in online discussions.
3 - Public Reactions To Supply Chain Events: A Twitter Sentimental
Analysis Event Study
David Wuttke, EBS University, Burgstr. 5, Oestrich-Winkel, 65375,
Germany, , Christoph Schmidt,
H. Sebastian Heese
We conduct sentiment analysis on Twitter data to evaluate public reactions to
supply chain events.
4 - Effectiveness Of Network-Based Evacuation Warning
Dissemination: An Experimental Investigation
Sulian Wang, Tsinghua University, 30 Shuangqing Road, Haidian,
Beijing, 100084, China,
Chen Wang
Effective risk communication with the general public plays a vital role in
emergency preparedness and response. Spontaneous dissemination of warning
messages in the decentralized channel (e.g., through online social network) is
shown to be an efficient way of complementing the traditional channels such as
television and radio. We model the individual willingness to spread warning
messages as a function of their past experiences and trust of the information
source, which is determined by both the false positive and false negative rates of
historical warnings. We validate our model by lab experiments and simulation.
MC39
207A-MCC
Applied Probability and Optimization II
Sponsored: Applied Probability
Sponsored Session
Chair: Jiaming Xu, The Wharton School of the University of
Pennsylvania,
1 - Low-rank Estimation: Why Non-convex Gradient Descent Works
Yudong Chen, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States,
Many problems in statistics involve fitting a low-rank matrix to noisy data. A
popular approach to the resulting rank-constrained optimization is SDP
relaxation, which does not scale to large problems. We instead consider gradient
descent over the low-rank space. This approach is scalable, but convergence was
unclear due to non-convexity. We develop a unified framework characterizing its
convergence and statistical properties. Our results provide insights to why we
expect non-convex methods to work in general, and yield global guarantees for
linear convergence in various concrete problems. Our framework handles
arbitrary ranks, noise and constraints, and does not require sample splitting.
2 - Scaled Least Squares Estimator For Glms
Murat A. Erdogdu, Stanford University,
We study the problem of efficiently estimating the coefficients of generalized
linear models (GLMs) in the large-scale setting where the number of observations
n is much larger than the number of predictors p, i.e. n>>p>>1. We show that in
GLMs with random design, the GLM coefficients are approximately proportional
to the corresponding ordinary least squares (OLS) coefficients.Using this relation,
we design an algorithm that achieves the same accuracy as the maximum
likelihood estimator through iterations that attain up to a cubic convergence rate,
and that are cheaper than any batch optimization algorithm by at least a factor of
O(p).
3 - Reinforcement With Fading Memories
Se-Young Yun, Los Alamos National Lab, Los Alamos, NM,
United States, , Kuang Xu
Can one make good decisions despite having a faulty memory? We study a
continuous-time action-rewards process, where an agent is to select a sequence of
actions from a finite set of alternative, and during the period when action $k$ is
selected, she accrues discrete rewards according to a Poisson process of rate
$\lambda_k$. However, each unit of reward randomly “fades” from the agent’s
memory at rate $n^{-1}$. We analyse a simple reward matching rule: the new
action is sampled from a distribution proportional to the recallable rewards
associated with actions chosen in the past.
MC39