We generalize the concept of K-convexity to an n-dimensional Euclidean space. The resulting concept of K-convexity is useful in addressing production and inventory problems where there are individual product setup costs and/or joint setup costs. We derive some basic properties of K-convex...

Dynamic pricing is designed to increase revenues or profits of the firm by adjusting prices in response to changes in the marginal value of capacity as described in Gallego and van Ryzin (1994). While thousands of papers have been written about dynamic pricing, this is to our knowledge the first...

A pervasive problem for retailers is to make assortment and inventory procurement decisions of substitutable products with the goal of maximizing expected profits over a pre-defined selling horizon. Multiple inventory replenishments are not allowed. This problem is challenging because of demand...

We consider two business models for a two-sided economy under uncertainty: dealership and marketplace. Although both business models can bridge the gap between demand and supply, it is not clear which model is better for the firm or for the consumers. We show that while the two models differ...

We propose a sequential recommendation-selection model where a seller recommends sets of products to consumers over multiple stages. consumers are heterogeneous in the patience levels, characterized by a certain number of stages that a consumer is willing to go through when making a purchase....

We propose and study a threshold utility model (TUM) where consumers buy any product whose net utility exceeds a non-negative, product-specific threshold. The thresholds are selected to maximize the expected surplus of the representative consumer subject to a bound on the expected number of...

We show the equivalence of discrete choice models and the class of binary choice forests, which are random forests based on binary choice trees. This suggests that standard machine learning techniques based on random forests can serve to estimate discrete choice models with an interpretable...

We consider a game between two capacity providers that compete for customers through a broker who earns commissions on sales. The providers compete by selecting commission margins and sales targets above which the margins on all sales increase. We are interested in the form of the contracts in...

A flexible product is a menu of two or more alternatives products serving the same market. Purchasers of flexible products are assigned to one of the alternatives at a later date. Gallego and Phillips show that capacitated suppliers, such as airlines and hotels, can potentially improve revenue...

In the k-prophet problem, a decision maker observes n items sequentially and selects up to k n items without recourse to maximize the total expected reward of the selected items. We consider a soft version of the problem where the decision maker can select up to k items in expectation rather...