ColloquiaFwd: Workshop in Production/Operations Management Science

[Margaret Jaffey]

This talk announcement from Prof. Schrage of the Graduate School of 
Business might be of interest to some of you.

Margaret
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>
>Subject: Workshop in Production/Operations Management Science
>
>
>       Speaker: Garrett van Ryzin
>  Organization: Columbia University
>         Title: A Discrete Choice Model of Yield Management in Airline
>                    Reservations and Elsewhere
>          Date: 19 April 2001,  Thursday
>          Time: 11:00 AM
>         Place: Stuart 216
>
>Abstract:
>  Customer choice behavior, such as ``buy-up" and ``buy-down", is an
>  important phenomenon in a wide range of industries. Yet current yield
>  management systems do not exploit this phenomenon. In this talk, we
>  present a model of yield management in which the buyers' choice behavior
>  is modeled explicitly using a multinomial logit model of demand. The
>  control problem is to decide which subset of fare classes to offer at
>  each point in time. The set of open fare classes then affects the
>  purchase probabilities for  each class. We formulate a dynamic program to
>  determine the optimal control policy and show that it reduces to a nested
>  allocation policy. Thus, the optimal choice-based policy can easily be
>  implemented in reservation systems that use nested allocation controls.
>  We also develop an estimation procedure for our model based on the
>  expectation-maximization (EM) method that jointly estimates arrival rates
>  and choice model parameters when no-purchase outcomes are unobservable.
>  Numerical results show that this combined optimization-estimation
>  approach may significantly improve revenue performance relative to
>  traditional leg-based models that do not account for choice behavior.
>
>  [This work is joint with Kalyan Talluri, Department of Economics and
>  Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.]
>
>
>  Paper available in Stuart 202c.
>
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>Upcoming talks:
>
>       Speaker: Tito Homem-de-Mello
>  Organization: Ohio State
>         Title: Optimization Under Uncertainty
>          Date: 10 May 2001,  Thursday
>          Time: 11:00 AM
>         Place: Stuart 216

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Margaret P. Jaffey			margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 161A)		(773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago		http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
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