2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting Program

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INFORMS Nashville – 2016
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2 - Markets For Technology And The Technological Trajectories Of
Entrepreneurial Startups
Mahka Moeen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, 03,
United States,
Seth Carnahan
This paper focuses on how entrepreneurial startups shape their opportunity set
for participation in the market for technology, by pursuing investments that
increase their attractiveness as a technology seller. Because startups in
technological proximity to a technology buyer may be considered favorable
technology sellers, we suggest that investment by potential buyers in a technical
domain is likely to spur investments by startups in the same or proximate
domains. We further examine the moderating effects of the direction of scientific
progress, commercial applicability, and density of the buyer’s alliance portfolio.
The empirical context is plant biotechnology field experiments.
3 - The Entrepreneurial Process: Evidence From A Nationally
Representative Survey
Aaron Chatterji, Duke University, Faqua School of Business,
100 Fuqua Drive, Durham, NC, 27708, United States,
, Victor Bennett
Using data from a new nationally representative survey of Americans, we
document patterns in the process of firm entry via entrepreneurship. Only 1/3 of
our respondents have even considered starting a business, motivated in the vast
majority of cases by non-pecuniary concerns rather than the pursuit of significant
market opportunities. Fewer than half of those who considered starting a business
take even the lowest cost steps, like searching the Internet for potential
competitors or speaking with a friend. This surprising lack of progress is evident in
comparison to nationally representative evidence on job search activities.
4 - Venture Capital Investment Strategies Under Financing
Constraints: Evidence From The 2008 Financial Crisis
Annamaria Conti, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA,
30332, United States,
Stuart Graham, Nishant Dass
Employing the 2008 financial crisis as an empirical setting, we examine the
investment strategies of venture capitalists (VCs) in response to liquidity supply
shocks. While predictably VCs reduce investment, we show that VCs reposition by
increasing their share of, and per-round funding to, startups operating in the VCs’
core sectors. These effects are driven by more-experienced VCs, and are strongest
in early-stage portfolio startups. Consistently, we find superior ex-post
performance among crisis-funded portfolio startups operating in more-
experienced VCs’ core sectors. Our findings point to more-experienced VCs
possessing information advantages, especially in their core sectors.
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110A-MCC
Latest Developments in Scheduling Research
Invited: Project Management and Scheduling
Invited Session
Chair: Zhi-Long Chen, Professor, University of Maryland,
Van Munching Hall, College Park, MD, 20742, United States,
1 - A Polyhedral Study Of The Physician Scheduling Problem With
Equalization Constraints
Pelin Damci-Kurt, Lightning Bolt Solutions, South San Francisco,
CA, United States, , Minjiao Zhang
We study a physician scheduling problem in which the goal is to minimize the
penalties associated with different requirements over a finite horizon. The
problem is divided and solved in two phases according to penalty values. We
focus on a relaxation including assignment demand and equalization constraints.
We present a class of valid inequalities, and report preliminary computational
experiments with them in a branch-and-cut algorithm on our client data sets.
2 - Models For Workforce Scheduling In A Union Shop
John Mittenthal, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL,
35487, United States, Minjiao Zhang
We develop an assignment problem model for worker to job assignments that
deviates as little as possible from a shift supervisor’s allocation of these workers.
These deviations occur due to worker absences. In addition to validating the
model over four weeks of data, we investigate a number of what-if questions.
3 - An Integrated Production Scheduling And Outbound Vehicle
Routing Problem
Kunpeng Li, Huazhong University of Science and Technology,
In this integrated production scheduling and vehicle routing problem, there is a
single machine for production and limited vehicles with capacity constraints for
transportation. The objective is to determine the decisions about production
scheduling, transportation batching and vehicle routing, to minimize the
maximum order delivery time. Based on an optimal property for production
scheduling and transportation batching, backward and forward batching methods
are developed, which are embedded into an improved genetic algorithm. The
results show that the genetic algorithm can provide high quality solutions,
compared with a two-stage algorithm and a published genetic algorithm.
4 - Integrated Production, Inventory And Distribution Problems
Zhi-Long Chen, University of Maryland,
Feng Li, Lixin Tang
We consider several integrated production, inventory and delivery problems that
arise in practical settings where customer orders have pre-specified delivery time
windows and are first processed in a plant and then delivered to the customers by
transporters that have fixed delivery departure times. The objective is to find an
integrated schedule for processing the orders, keeping finished orders in
inventory if necessary, and delivering them to the customers such that the total
inventory and delivery cost is minimum. We study complexity and propose
algorithms for various problems. For the two most general problems, we propose
combined column generation and tabu search heuristic algorithms.
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110B-MCC
Auction Design Topics
Invited: Auctions
Invited Session
Chair: Sasa Pekec, Duke University, 100 Fuqua Drive, Durham, NC,
27708-0120, United States,
1 - Stable Matchings With Proportionality Constraints
Thanh Nguyen, Purdue University, ,
Rakesh Vinay Vohra
In designing two sided markets, a stable matching is often desired to satisfy
certain additional side constraints. Current literature has mainly focused on
constraints where the relevant “right hand sides” are absolute numbers specified
a-priori; before agents on the “proposing” side make their participation decisions.
There is a danger, then, of over constraining the problem. It is sometimes more
natural to express the relevant constraints as proportions. We develop a
framework to obtain stable matchings that almost satisfy floor and ceiling
proportional side constraints. Our results are based on a generalization of Scarf’s
lemma, which is of independent interest.
2 - Budget-constrained Procurement
Alexandre Belloni, Duke University,
Giuseppe Lopomo, Leslie Marx, Roberto Steri
We consider a setting where a buyer procures up to D units of a homogeneous
good (e.g. a medical drug) but needs to satisfy a hard budget constraint of
spending at most B in total payments. Furthermore, the buyer faces suppliers
with privately known costs. We characterize the optimal procurement mechanism
as well as new simple mechanisms (which are at least as good as the second price
auction with reservation price) that are easy to implement via a sequential
auction. In particular we highlight how the budget constrain fundamentally alters
the structure of the optimal mechanism.
3 - Robust Bidding Policies
Sasa Pekec, Duke University,
We study the best-response decision problem of an auction bidder who wants to
maximize her worst-case payoff, while facing uncertainty about rivals’ objectives
and bids. The information about rivals is modeled via an uncertainty set
consisting of all possible realizations of rivals’ bids. Maximizing the bidder’s worst-
case payoff over this set yields robust bidding policies that do not depend on
distributional assumptions. Robust bidding policies are constructed for several
multi-item auction formats, depending on how supply (homogeneous or
heterogeneous items) and demand (unit-demand or multiple-demand bidders) is
handled.
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