题目：Online Resource Allocation with Applications to Revenue Management

报告人：美国麻省理工学院 David Simchi-Levi教授

报告时间：6月3日（周一） 下午3:00

地点：管理楼管阶一

报告人简介：

David Simchi-Levi is a Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT. He is considered one of the premier thought leaders in supply chain management and business analytics. Professor Simchi-Levi is the current Editor-in-Chief of Management Science, one of the two flagship journals of INFORMS. He served as the Editor-in-Chief for Operations Research (2006-2012), the other flagship journal of INFORMS and for Naval Research Logistics (2003-2005). His research focuses on developing and implementing robust and efficient techniques for operations management. He has published widely in professional journals on both practical and theoretical aspects of supply chain and revenue management. Professor Simchi-Levi co-authored the books Managing the Supply Chain (McGraw-Hill, 2004), the award winning Designing and Managing the Supply Chain (McGraw-Hill, 2007) and The Logic of Logistics (3rd edition, Springer 2013). He also published Operations Rules: Delivering Customer Value through Flexible Operations (MIT Press, 2011). 

报告摘要：

Online resource allocation is a fundamental problem in OR and CS with applications such as airline pricing and booking, distributing jobs to candidates, assigning advertisers to ad slots, and matching drivers to passengers. These problems can be abstracted as follows: there are fixed resources, each of which can be sold at multiple known prices. These resources must be allocated on-the-fly, without assuming anything about future demand.  In this talk we cover the CS and OR literature on the problem and in particular focus on two techniques: exploration and exploitation methods, as well as competitive analysis.

In the latter case, we review new algorithms that achieve tight competitive ratios under the integral or asymptotic settings. Our algorithms are simple, intuitive and robust and our competitive ratios are provably optimal, for every possible set of prices.

In the former case, we discuss an efficient and effective dynamic pricing algorithm, which builds upon the Thompson sampling algorithm used for multi-armed bandit problems by incorporating inventory constraints into the pricing decisions. The algorithm proves to have both strong theoretical performance guarantees as well as promising numerical performance results when compared to other algorithms developed for the same setting.

Finally, we compare the performance of both techniques, exploration and exploitation methods and competitive analysis, with real-world and synthetic data from various retail applications.