January 2020
Noa Zychlinski — Managing Queues with Different Resource Requirements
Abstract: Queueing models that are used to capture various service settings typically assume that customers require a single unit of resources (servers) to be processed. However, there are many service settings where such an assumption may fail to capture the heterogeneity in resource requirements of different customers. For instance, clinical guidelines suggest that patients should be classified based on the level of medical attention/supervision required. We propose a multi-server queueing model with multiple customer classes in which customers from different…
Find out more »Mika Sumida — Network Revenue Management with Performance Guarantees: An Approximate Dynamic Programming Approach
Abstract: In network revenue management problems, we have a collection of resources with limited capacities to satisfy the requests for products arriving randomly over time. If we accept a request for a product, then we generate a product-specific revenue and consume the capacities of a combination of resources used by that product. The goal is to maximize the total expected revenue from the accepted product requests. Dynamic programming formulations to compute the optimal policy suffer from the curse of dimensionality. Instead, we provide an approximate policy with a performance guarantee. Our approximate…
Find out more »Somya Singhvi — Economically Motivated Adulteration in Farming Supply Chains
Economically motivated adulteration (EMA) is a serious threat to public health. In this paper, we develop a modeling framework to examine farms’ strategic adulteration behavior and the resulting EMA risk in farming supply chains. We study both “preemptive EMA,” where farms engage in adulteration to decrease the likelihood of producing low-quality output, and“reactive EMA,” where adulteration is done to increase the perceived quality of the output. We fully characterize the farms’equilibrium adulteration behavior in both types of EMA and analyze…
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