Related papers: Towards A Personal Shopper's Dilemma: Time vs Cost
We have developed a conversational recommendation system designed to help users navigate through a set of limited options to find the best choice. Unlike many internet scale systems that use a singular set of search terms and return a…
Inventory Routing Problem (IRP) is a crucial challenge in supply chain management as it involves optimizing efficient route selection while considering the uncertainty of inventory demand planning. To solve IRPs, usually a two-stage…
The problem of designing a profit-maximizing, Bayesian incentive compatible and individually rational mechanism with flexible consumers and costly heterogeneous supply is considered. In our setup, each consumer is associated with a…
One-way car-sharing systems are transportation systems that allow customers to rent cars at stations scattered around the city, use them for a short journey, and return them at any station. The maximum customers' satisfaction problem…
We present a physics inspired heuristic method for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Our approach is specifically motivated by the desire to avoid trapping in metastable local minima- a common occurrence in hard problems with…
We consider the problem of how an individual can use term life insurance to maximize the probability of reaching a given bequest goal, an important problem in financial planning. We assume that the individual buys instantaneous term life…
Searching for optimal ways in a network is an important task in multiple application areas such as social networks, co-citation graphs or road networks. In the majority of applications, each edge in a network is associated with a certain…
In many markets buyers are poorly informed about which firms sell the product (product availability) and prices, and therefore have to spend time to obtain this information. In contrast, sellers typically have a better idea about which…
We are witnessing an increasing use of data-driven predictive models to inform decisions. As decisions have implications for individuals and society, there is increasing pressure on decision makers to be transparent about their decision…
This paper addresses an integrated lot-sizing and scheduling problem in the industry of consumer goods for personal care, a very competitive market in which the good customer service level and the cost management show up in the competition…
The optimal pricing problem is a fundamental problem that arises in combinatorial auctions. Suppose that there is one seller who has indivisible items and multiple buyers who want to purchase a combination of the items. The seller wants to…
We study mechanisms for selling a single item when buyers have private costs for participating in the mechanism. An agent's participation cost can also be interpreted as an outside option value that she must forego to participate. This…
This paper discusses the revenue management (RM) problem to maximize revenue by pricing items or services. One challenge in this problem is that the demand distribution is unknown and varies over time in real applications such as airline…
The problem of content search through comparisons has recently received considerable attention. In short, a user searching for a target object navigates through a database in the following manner: the user is asked to select the object most…
Routing and scheduling problems are fundamental problems in combinatorial optimization, and also have many applications. Most variations of these problems are NP-Hard, so we need to use heuristics to solve these problems on large instances,…
Ranking items is a central task in many information retrieval and recommender systems. User input for the ranking task often comes in the form of ratings on a coarse discrete scale. We ask whether it is possible to recover a fine-grained…
We study sublinear time algorithms for the traveling salesman problem (TSP). First, we focus on the closely related {\em maximum path cover} problem, which asks for a collection of vertex disjoint paths that include the maximum number of…
A smartphone user's personal hotspot (pH) allows him to share cellular connection to another (e.g., a traveler) in the vicinity, but such sharing consumes the limited data quota in his two-part tariff plan and may lead to overage charge.…
This paper investigates a stochastic inventory management problem in which a cash-constrained small retailer periodically purchases a product from suppliers and sells it to a market while facing non-stationary demands. In each period, the…
Many combinatorial optimization problems can be formulated as the search for a subgraph that satisfies certain properties and minimizes the total weight. We assume here that the vertices correspond to points in a metric space and can take…