Monthly Archives: December 2016

Talks I Attended at INFORMS 2016

Documented mostly for my future reference.

Sunday 8am, track SA36:
-An Empirical Investigation of Network Effects in Automobile Sales by Tianjun Feng, Fuqiuang Zhang, and Peiwen Yu
-The Operational Value of Social Media Information by Dennis Zhang, Antonio Moreno-Garcia, Ruomeng Cui, and Santiago Gallino
-When you work with a super man, will you also fly? An empirical study of the impact of coworkers on performance by Serguei Netessine and Fangyun Tang
-CEO overconfidence and inventory management by Fuqiang Zhang, Tianjun Feng, and Qing Zhang

Sunday Plenary: Cognitive Computing: From Breakthroughs in the lab to applications in the field by Guru Banavar of IBM Research

Sunday 11am, track SB09:
-Biomass Supply contract pricing and environmental policy analysis: an agent-based modeling approach by Shiyang Huang and Guiping Hu
-On the effectiveness of tax incentives to support biomass co-firing by Hadi Karimi and Sandra Eksioglu
-A game-theoretic model of biomass co-firing policies by Sandra Eksioglu and Armin Khademi
-Evaluation of a wind farm project by Metin Cakanyildirim

Sunday 1:30pm, track SC28:
-Dynamic optimization of multichannel advertising campaigns in an online advertising supply chain by Changseung Yoo, Anitesh Barua, and Genaro Gutierrez
-Variability in labor schedules: Effects on store performance and employee turnover by Hyun Seok Lee, Saravanan Kesavan, and Camelia Kuhnen

Sunday 1:30pm, track SC30
-Managerial Attention, Reminders, and the Energy Efficiency Gap by Enno Siemsen and Suvrat Dhanokar
-Does learning from inspections affect environmental performance? Evidence from unconventional oil and gas wells by Suresh Muthulingam and Vidya Mani

Sunday 4:30pm, track SD29:
-Valuing distributed energy resources in electricity system planning: locational benefits and economies of unit scale by Jesse Jenkins
-Combined heat and power production – valuing flexible operation in an uncertain environment by Chritoph Weber

Sunday 4:30pm, track SD28
-Robust Supply function equilibrium in renewable energy markets by Yuanzhang Xiao, Chaithanya Bandi, and Ermin Wei
-An analysis of demand response programs in the wholesale electricity market by Asligul Serasu Duran, Baris Ata, and Ozge Islegen

Monday 8am, track MA35:
-The use of technology to improve engagement through accountability by Gad Allon
-Innovations in teaching operations management at UCLA by Guillaume Roels
-Architecting new business models (in the classroom) by Karan Girotra
-Ideo: Human-centered service design – multimedia-enhanced teaching and learning by Ryan Buell

Monday Plenary: Public health preparedness: Answering (largely unanswerable) questions iwth operations research by Margaret Brandeau

Monday 1:30pm, track MC29:
-Operational response to climate change: Do profitable carbon abatement opportunities decrease over time? by Christian Blanco, Felipe Caro, and Charles Corbett
-Closing a supplier’s energy efficiency gap: The role of assessment assistance and procurement commitment by Quang Dang Nguyen, Karen Donohue, and Mili Mehrotra
-Mind the Gap: Coordinating Energy Efficiency and Demand Response by Eric Webb, Owen Wu, and Kyle Cattani

Tuesday 8am, track TA29:
-Energy efficiency contracting in supply chains under asymmetric bargaining power by Ali Shantia, Sam Aflaki, and Andrea Masini
-An analysis of time-based pricing in electricity supply chains by Asligul Serasu Duran, Baris Ata, and Ozge Islegen
-Investments in renewable and conventional energy: The role of operational flexibility by Kevin Shang, Gurhan Kok, and Safak Yucel
-Explaining the variation in progress in the US nuclear industry by Christian Blanco, Felipe Caro, and Charles Corbett

Tuesday 11am, track TB29:
-Green sourcing – the role of premium sharing and consulting services by Xi Chen
-Inducing prompt disclosure in the presence of evasive effort by Shouqiang Wang, Peng Sun, and Francis De Vericourt
-The adoption of smart home appliance form energy shifting by Wenbin Wang and Yannan Jin
-Incentives for joint product and process improvement under collective extended producer responsibility by Luyi Gui

Tuesday 1:30pm, track TC34:
-Do mandatory overtime laws improve quality? Staffing decisions and operational flexibility of nursing homes by Lauren Lu and Susan Lu
-Predicting Nurse Turnover And Its Impact on Staffing Decisions by Eric Webb and Kurt Bretthauer
-Hospital readmissions reduction program: An economic and operational analysis by Dennis Zhang

Tuesday Keynote: Optimizing the future – supply chain at Amazon by Jason Murray

Tuesday 4:30pm, track TD37:
-The impact of carbon pricing on improving supply chain energy efficiency by Quang Dang Nguyen, Karen Donohue, and Mili Mehrotra
-Quantifying the impact of intermittent renewable generation on German electricity market by Shadi Goodarzi, Derek Bunn, and Syed Basher
-Designing hydro supply chains for water, food, energy, and flood nexus by Kwon Gi Mun, Raza Ali Rafique, and Yao Zhao
-Reversing the death spiral: A new business model for utility firms under social network effects by Safak Yucel, Gurhan Kok, and Kevin Shang

Wednesday Keynote: The goals of analysis are understanding, decisions, and influencing policy by Gerald Brown

Wednesday 11am, track WB31:
-Ethics, Bounded Rationality, and IP sharing in knowledge-based outsourcing by Manu Goyal and Krishnan Anand
-Accurate estimation of retail store traffic from people counters to achieve better conversion by Anup Hanamant
-Mitigating digital discrimination with reviews in the sharing economy: Field evidence from Airbnb by Dennis Zhang, Jun Li, and Ruomeng Cui
-Impact of operational risks in financial organizations by Yuqian Xu, Fangyun Tan, and Sergeuei Netessine

Wednesday 12:45pm, track WC31:
-Rational abandonment from observable priority queues by Philipp Afeche and Vahid Sarhangian
-Design of discretionary service lines: An operational driver of variety by Laurens Debo and Cuihong Li
-Linking Customer Behavior and Delay Announcements: Are Customers Really Rational? by Eric Webb, Qiuping Yu, and Kurt Bretthauer

Wednesday 2:45pm, track WD27:
-The effect of discrete workshifts on non-terminating queues by Robert Batt, Diwas KC, Bradley Staats, and Brian Patterson
-A near-term mortality indicator for terminal cancer patients using high frequency medical data by Donald Lee and Edieal Pinker
-A machine learning approach for personalized health care outcome analysis by Guihua Wang, Jun Li, and Wallace Hopp
-Are patients patient? The effect of universal healthcare on emergency department visits by Diwas KC

Wednesday 4:30pm, track WE32:
-An analysis of world baseball softball confederation premier 12 schedule by Seong Kim and JC Kim
-The role of offensive system in the NBA draft by Ryan Chen, Eli Shayer, Travis Chen, and Nicholas Canova
-Using Past Scores and Regularization to Create a Winning NFL Betting Model by Eric Webb and Wayne Winston
-An optimal pacing strategy for ultramarathons by Kristoper Pruitt and Justin Hill

Book Review – Hooked

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
by Nir Eyal, 2014

hooked

Quick read about getting users invested and addicted to your product, with a focus on apps. Walks you through four steps to build and strengthen the relationship: Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, and Investment. Draws on behavioral research in places and gives decent examples from current apps (circa 2014).

Qualifying a Worthy Problem

Great talk by Professor Gerald Brown on the last day of INFORMS. If you ever have a chance to hear him speak, take it. Slides from his talk, which started with some motivating examples of military OR, are available here.

5 steps to qualifying a worthy problem to study/solve:
1. What is the problem?
If you can’t describe the problem, how do you know there is one? How would you ever solve it? The client never gives an unambiguous problem description, so work to get to the heart of the matter. If you can describe the problem, move to step 2.

2. Why is this problem important?
Don’t waste your time on trivialities. If the problem is important, move to step 3.

3. How is this problem now solved?
Few problems are entirely ignored, so be sure to understand how the problem is currently solved to ensure you are providing adequate improvement. If you can do significantly better, move to step 4.

4. How will you solve this problem?
Up until now, “solving the problem” has been agnostic toward the type of analysis. Now, choose an appropriate methodology and ensure the problem is tractable.

5. How will you know when you have succeeded?
Answer this before you start solving. It’s difficult/impossible to succeed if the goal is constantly moving, so hammer out what success looks like for this problem.