Related papers: Pricing in Queues with Abandonments: Optimal Polic…
The dynamic pricing problem of a freeway corridor with high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes was formulated and solved based on a point queue abstraction of the traffic system [Yin and Lou, 2009]. However, existing pricing strategies cannot…
We study an optimal-control problem of polling systems with large switchover times, when a holding cost is incurred on the queues. In particular, we consider a stochastic network with a single server that switches between several buffers…
Crowdsourced on-demand services offer benefits such as reduced costs, faster service fulfillment times, greater adaptability, and contributions to sustainable urban transportation in on-demand delivery contexts. However, the success of an…
An auction house cannot generally provide the optimal auction technology to every client. Instead it provides one or several auction technologies, and clients select the most appropriate one. For example, eBay provides ascending auctions…
We consider the Item Pricing problem for revenue maximization in the limited supply setting, where a single seller with $n$ items caters to $m$ buyers with unknown subadditive valuation functions who arrive in a sequence. The seller sets…
In contextual dynamic pricing, a seller sequentially prices goods based on contextual information. Buyers will purchase products only if the prices are below their valuations. The goal of the seller is to design a pricing strategy that…
Motivated by the increasing use of online appointment booking platforms, we study how to offer appointment slots to customers in order to maximize the total number of slots booked. We develop two models, non-sequential offering and…
A patient seller aims to sell a good to an impatient buyer (i.e., one who discounts utility over time). The buyer will remain in the market for a period of time $T$, and her private value is drawn from a publicly known distribution. What is…
In many service systems, especially those in healthcare, customer waiting times can result in increased service requirements. Such service slowdowns can significantly impact system performance. Therefore, it is important to properly account…
Same-day delivery for e-commerce has become a popular service. Companies usually offer several time delivery options with the earliest one being next hour delivery. Due to tight delivery deadlines and thin margins, companies often find it…
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…
We consider the classical mathematical economics problem of {\em Bayesian optimal mechanism design} where a principal aims to optimize expected revenue when allocating resources to self-interested agents with preferences drawn from a known…
Given a batch of human computation tasks, a commonly ignored aspect is how the price (i.e., the reward paid to human workers) of these tasks must be set or varied in order to meet latency or cost constraints. Often, the price is set…
Multi-Access edge computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm where users offload computationally intensive jobs to the Access Point (AP). Given that the AP's resources are shared by selfish users, pricing is a useful tool for incentivising…
We consider a matching system with random arrivals of items of different types. The items wait in queues -- one per each item type -- until they are "matched." Each matching requires certain quantities of items of different types; after a…
A single queue incorporating a retransmission protocol is investigated, assuming that the sequence of per effort success probabilities in the Automatic Retransmission reQuest (ARQ) chain is a priori defined and no channel state information…
Matching platforms, from ridesharing to food delivery to competitive gaming, face a fundamental operational dilemma: match agents immediately to minimize waiting costs, or delay to exploit the efficiency gains of thicker markets. Yet…
In this paper, we develop a new method for finding an optimal biddingstrategy in sequential auctions, using a dynamic programming technique. Theexisting method assumes that the utility of a user is represented in anadditive form. Thus, the…
We consider a multi-stage stochastic optimization problem originally introduced by Cygan et al. (2013), studying how a single server should prioritize stochastically departing customers. In this setting, our objective is to determine an…
We consider stopping problems in which a decision maker (DM) faces an unknown state of nature and decides sequentially whether to stop and take an irreversible action; pay a fee and obtain additional information; or wait without acquiring…