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The use of reward functions to structure AI learning and decision making is core to the current reinforcement learning paradigm; however, without careful design of reward functions, agents can learn to solve problems in ways that may be…

This paper introduces a performative scenario optimization framework for decision-dependent chance-constrained problems. Unlike classical stochastic optimization, we account for the feedback loop where decisions actively shape the…

This paper proposes a novel method for demand forecasting in a pricing context. Here, modeling the causal relationship between price as an input variable to demand is crucial because retailers aim to set prices in a (profit) optimal manner…

We introduce a combinatorial optimization-enriched machine learning pipeline and a novel learning paradigm to solve inventory routing problems with stochastic demand and dynamic inventory updates. After each inventory update, our approach…

When we plan to use money as an incentive to change the behavior of a person (such as making riders to deliver more orders or making consumers to buy more items), the common approach of this problem is to adopt a two-stage framework in…

We introduce a multi-armed bandit model where the reward is a sum of multiple random variables, and each action only alters the distributions of some of them. After each action, the agent observes the realizations of all the variables. This…

Consequential decision-making incentivizes individuals to strategically adapt their behavior to the specifics of the decision rule. While a long line of work has viewed strategic adaptation as gaming and attempted to mitigate its effects,…

This paper presents a weighted optimization framework that unifies the binary,multi-valued, continuous, as well as mixture of discrete and continuous treatment, under the unconfounded treatment assignment. With a general loss function, the…

Targeted marketing policies target different customers with different marketing actions. While most research has focused on training targeting policies without managerial constraints, in practice, many firms face managerial constraints when…

Ineffective fundraising lowers the resources charities can use to provide goods. We combine a field experiment and a causal machine-learning approach to increase a charity's fundraising effectiveness. The approach optimally targets a…

When users can benefit from certain predictive outcomes, they may be prone to act to achieve those outcome, e.g., by strategically modifying their features. The goal in strategic classification is therefore to train predictive models that…

Overconservatism has long been recognized as a major issue with robust optimization, despite its key advantages of tractability, performance guarantee, and limited information. To address this issue, a new criterion is proposed that can…

Option-critic learning is a general-purpose reinforcement learning (RL) framework that aims to address the issue of long term credit assignment by leveraging temporal abstractions. However, when dealing with extended timescales, discounting…

In the strategic facility location problem, a set of agents report their locations in a metric space and the goal is to use these reports to open a new facility, minimizing an aggregate distance measure from the agents to the facility.…

In this paper, we study multiple problems from sponsored product optimization in ad system, including position-based de-biasing, click-conversion multi-task learning, and calibration on predicted click-through-rate (pCTR). We propose a…

Causal reinforcement learning (RL) lacks benchmarks for complex systems that combine sequential decision making, hidden information, large masked action spaces, and explicit causal structure. We introduce MTG-Causal-RL, a Gymnasium…

A central problem in business concerns the optimal allocation of limited resources to a set of available tasks, where the payoff of these tasks is inherently uncertain. In credit card fraud detection, for instance, a bank can only assign a…

This study explores the enhancement of customer satisfaction in the airline industry, a critical factor for retaining customers and building brand reputation, which are vital for revenue growth. Utilizing a combination of machine learning…

Explicit and implicit bias clouds human judgement, leading to discriminatory treatment of minority groups. A fundamental goal of algorithmic fairness is to avoid the pitfalls in human judgement by learning policies that improve the overall…

Clinical predictive algorithms are increasingly being used to form the basis for optimal treatment policies--that is, to enable interventions to be targeted to the patients who will presumably benefit most. Despite taking advantage of…