Related papers: A Counterintuitive Example in Inventory Management
In many areas of engineering and sciences, decision rules and control strategies are usually designed based on nominal values of relevant system parameters. To ensure that a control strategy or decision rule will work properly when the…
We study how competitive forces may drive firms to inefficiently acquire startup talent. In our model, two rival firms have the capacity to acquire and integrate a startup operating in an orthogonal market. We show that firms may pursue…
We study causal inference under case-control and case-population sampling. Specifically, we focus on the binary-outcome and binary-treatment case, where the parameters of interest are causal relative and attributable risks defined via the…
We consider a general class of high-volume, fast-moving production-inventory systems based on both lost-sales and backorder inventory models. Such systems require a fundamental understanding of the asymptotic behavior of key performance…
In this paper we study a continuous time stochastic inventory model for a commodity traded in the spot market and whose supply purchase is affected by price and demand uncertainty. A firm aims at meeting a random demand of the commodity at…
Latent Chain-of-Thought (Latent CoT) models promise efficient reasoning via continuous representations, yet exhibit puzzling performance inconsistencies: excelling at exploration (ProsQA: 97.0%) but failing at computation (GSM8K: 34.1%). We…
This paper deals with the unconstrained and constrained cases for continuous-time Markov decision processes under the finite-horizon expected total cost criterion. The state space is denumerable and the transition and cost rates are allowed…
Inverse optimization (Inverse optimal control) is the task of imputing a cost function such that given test points (trajectories) are (nearly) optimal with respect to the discovered cost. Prior methods in inverse optimization assume that…
We study the continuity properties of optimal solutions to stochastic control problems with respect to initial probability measures and applications of these to the robustness of optimal control policies applied to systems with incomplete…
In stochastic control applications, typically only an ideal model (controlled transition kernel) is assumed and the control design is based on the given model, raising the problem of performance loss due to the mismatch between the assumed…
We propose a formal model for counterfactual estimation with unobserved confounding in "data-rich" settings, i.e., where there are a large number of units and a large number of measurements per unit. Our model provides a bridge between the…
Inverse Optimal Control (IOC) seeks to recover an unknown cost from expert demonstrations, and it provides a systematic way of modeling experts' decision mechanisms while considering the prior information of the cost functions.…
We address the challenge of learning safe and robust decision policies in presence of uncertainty in context of the real scientific problem of adaptive resource oversubscription to enhance resource efficiency while ensuring safety against…
In their seminal paper Moseley, Niaparast, and Ravi introduced the Joint Replenishment Problem (JRP) with holding and backlog costs that models the trade-off between ordering costs, holding costs, and backlog costs in supply chain planning…
We study the optimal control of storage which is used for arbitrage, i.e. for buying a commodity when it is cheap and selling it when it is expensive. Our particular concern is with the management of energy systems, although the results are…
We study a general problem of allocating limited resources to heterogeneous customers over time under model uncertainty. Each type of customer can be serviced using different actions, each of which stochastically consumes some combination…
We consider the problem of maximizing the expected average reward obtained over an infinite time horizon by $n$ weakly coupled Markov decision processes. Our setup is a substantial generalization of the multi-armed restless bandit problem…
We consider assortment optimization over a continuous spectrum of products represented by the unit interval, where the seller's problem consists of determining the optimal subset of products to offer to potential customers. To describe the…
Regulators and academics are increasingly interested in the causal effect that algorithmic actions of a digital platform have on consumption. We introduce a general causal inference problem we call the steerability of consumption that…
The classical optimal investment and consumption problem with infinite horizon is studied in the presence of transaction costs. Both proportional and fixed costs as well as general utility functions are considered. Weak dynamic programming…