Contributors

Abstract

Gad Allon (“ ‘We Will Be Right with You’: Managing Customer Expectations with Vague Promises and Cheap Talk ”) is an associate professor of managerial economics and decision science at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Recently he has been studying models of information sharing among firms and customers both in service and retail settings. He is also conducting empirical studies to investigate time-based competition in the fast-food industry as well as the factors contributing to emergency department overcrowding. Ravi Anupindi (“ Integrated Optimization of Procurement, Processing, and Trade of Commodities ”) is Michael R. and Mary Kay Hallman Fellow and Professor of Operations Management at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His main research areas include supply chain management, strategic sourcing, lean operations, and marketing-operations interfaces. His more recent interest is in supply chain issues as well as health-care delivery models in the emerging economies. Achal Bassamboo (“ ‘We Will Be Right with You’: Managing Customer Expectations with Vague Promises and Cheap Talk ”) is an associate professor of managerial economics and decision science at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His research interests lie in the areas of service systems, revenue management, and information sharing. His current research involves designing flexible service systems with a focus on capacity planning and effects of parameter uncertainty. He is also studying credibility of information provided by a service provider or a retailer to its customers. Dimitris Bertsimas (“ Optimal Selection of Airport Runway Configurations ”) is the Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the codirector of the Operations Research Center at MIT, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. His research interests include discrete, robust, and stochastic optimization and their applications. E. Borgonovo (“ A Study of Interactions in the Risk Assessment of Complex Engineering Systems: An Application to Space PSA ”) is the director of the ELEUSI research center and associate professor at the Department of Decision Sciences, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy. He received his Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a recipient of several national and international awards, including the McCormack Fellowship of the Westinghouse Corporation. He is a member of the editorial boards of several journals including European Journal of Operational Research, Reliability Engineering and System Safety, International Journal of Mathematics in Operational Research, International Journal of Risk Management, and International Journal of Service and Computing-Oriented Manufacturing. He is the author of more than 90 publications. Ivan Contreras (“ Benders Decomposition for Large-Scale Uncapacitated Hub Location ”) is a post-doctoral fellow at HEC Montréal and at the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT). In 2009 he received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at the Technical University of Catalonia. His research interests include location analysis, network design, combinatorial optimization, and decomposition methods for large-scale optimization. His main papers have appeared in Transportation Science, INFORMS Journal on Computing, European Journal of Operational Research, Computers & Operations Research, Operations Research Spectrum, and Annals of Operations Research. Jean-François Cordeau (“ Benders Decomposition for Large-Scale Uncapacitated Hub Location ”) is a professor of logistics and operations management at HEC Montréal, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Logistics and Transportation. He is also an assistant director of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT) and member of the Groupe d'études et de recherche en analyse des décisions (GERAD). He is associate editor of Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research, INFOR, OR Insight, and a member of the editorial board of Computers & Operations Research. He has authored or coauthored more than 80 articles in the areas of transportation, logistics, combinatorial optimization, and decomposition methods for large-scale optimization. Sripad K. Devalkar (“ Integrated Optimization of Procurement, Processing, and Trade of Commodities ”) is an assistant professor of operations management at the Indian School of Business. His interests lie in exploring problems at the interface of operations management, finance, and risk management. The research published here was conducted when he was a Ph.D. student in the Operations and Management Science Department at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Francis de Véricourt (“ Nurse Staffing in Medical Units: A Queueing Perspective ”) is an associate professor of technology and operations management at INSEAD and adjunct professor at Duke University. His academic interests are in operations excellence. His recent research focuses on health care and sustainability. Andreas Ehrenmann (“ Generation Capacity Expansion in a Risky Environment: A Stochastic Equilibrium Analysis ”) is chief analyst in the Center of Expertise in Economic Modeling and Studies in GDF Suez. He obtained his Diploma in mathematics from the University of Karlsruhe and his Ph.D. from the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge (Management Science Group). Jiejian Feng (“ An Optimal Policy for Joint Dynamic Price and Lead-Time Quotation ”) is a visiting faculty member in the Business School of St. Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in operations management, his M.Phil. in human factors from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and his B.A. in applied mathematics from the South China University of Technology. His research interests include operations management, financial engineering, and footwear design and development. Michael Frankovich (“ Optimal Selection of Airport Runway Configurations ”) is a doctoral candidate at the Operations Research Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is broadly interested in optimization and its applications, notably in transportation. Cheng-Der Fuh (“ Efficient Simulation of Value at Risk with Heavy-Tailed Risk Factors ”) is Chair Professor in the Graduate Institute of Statistics, National Central University, and research fellow in the Institute of Statistical Science, Academia Sinica, both in Taiwan. His research interests are in hidden Markov models, Markov chain Monte Carlo, change point detection, and quantitative finance. This paper reflects part of his continuing interest and effort in constructing efficient simulation schemes. Itai Gurvich (“ ‘We Will Be Right with You’: Managing Customer Expectations with Vague Promises and Cheap Talk ”) is an assistant professor of managerial economics and decision science at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He studies queueing aspects of large-scale service systems with a focus on network design, staffing, and routing decisions. Arie Harel (“ Convexity Results for the Erlang Delay and Loss Formulae When the Server Utilization Is Held Constant ”) is an associate professor at the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, City University of New York. This paper continues his long-standing interest in the convexity properties of queueing systems. Tobias Harks (“ The Worst-Case Efficiency of Cost Sharing Methods in Resource Allocation Games ”) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Combinatorial Optimization and Graph Algorithms Group of the Institute of Mathematics at Technical University Berlin. His research covers algorithmic game theory, approximation algorithms, and online algorithms. He is particularly interested in formulating and analyzing game-theoretic models related to traffic and computer networks. Ya-Hui Hsu (“ Efficient Simulation of Value at Risk with Heavy-Tailed Risk Factors ”) completed her Ph.D. in statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She works as a statistician at Abbott Laboratories, a health-care company based in Abbott Park, Illinois. Her research interests include quantile regression, risk management, Bayesian inference, stochastic calculus, and importance sampling. This paper reflects part of her continuing interest and effort in constructing efficient simulation schemes. Inchi Hu (“ Efficient Simulation of Value at Risk with Heavy-Tailed Risk Factors ”) is a professor at the School of Business and Management, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. This paper reflects part of his continuing interest and effort in constructing efficient simulation schemes. A. J. E. M. Janssen (“ Refining Square-Root Safety Staffing by Expanding Erlang C ”) received his engineering degree and Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), the Netherlands, in 1976 and 1979, respectively. From 1979 to 1981 he was a Bateman Research Instructor at the Mathematics Department of California Institute of Technology. From 1981 until 2010 he worked with Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, where he was a research fellow since 1999 and recipient of the Gilles Holst Award in 2003. His principal responsibility at Philips Research was to provide high-level mathematical service and consultancy in mathematical analysis. He continues his research and consultancy activities from his current affiliations with TU/e, EURANDOM, and the Department of Electrical Engineering, with additional affiliation with TU–Delft (optics) and ASML. In 2003, he was elected Fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to mathematical time-frequency analysis and signal processing. He has published over 180 papers in the fields of Fourier analysis, signal analysis, time-frequency analysis, electron microscopy, optical diffraction theory, acoustics, and queueing theory. His current interests include the application of mathematical techniques as used in the theory of optical aberrations to the characterization of acoustical radiators. Otis B. Jennings (“ Nurse Staffing in Medical Units: A Queueing Perspective ”) is an associate professor of operations management at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business. His academic interests are in queueing systems as models of manufacturing and service systems and the fluid and diffusion asymptotic analysis of such systems. Jae Ho Kim (“ Optimal Energy Commitments with Storage and Intermittent Supply ”) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, where he has been a student since 2007. He earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in electrical engineering at Cooper Union in New York in 2007. His research area is in dynamic decision making under uncertainty, and he works at the CASTLE Laboratory under the supervision of Warren Powell. Matthias Köppe (“ Rational Generating Functions and Integer Programming Games ”) is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics at the Otto von Guericke University of Magdeburg in 2002. His research interests include integer programming and computational discrete mathematics. Gilbert Laporte (“ Benders Decomposition for Large-Scale Uncapacitated Hub Location ”) is a professor of operations research at HEC Montréal and Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management. He is also a member of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT) and founding member of the Groupe d'études et de recherche en analyse des décisions (GERAD). He has authored or coauthored 15 books and more than 380 scientific articles in combinatorial optimization, mostly in the areas of vehicle routing, location, and timetabling. He is the former editor-in-chief of Transportation Science and Computers & Operations Research. He is associate editor or editorial board member of Transportation Science, Networks, Naval Research Logistics, Computers & Operations Research, and several other journals. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, from which he received the Innis-Gérin Medal. In 2009 he received the Robert M. Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science from the Transportation Science and Logistics Society of INFORMS. Yun Fong Lim (“ Cellular Bucket Brigades ”) is an assistant professor at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University, where he teaches operations management at the undergraduate and graduate levels. His research centers on workforce management in manufacturing and services. He is especially interested in boosting productivity of work teams through cross-training, work-sharing, self-organization, and effective remuneration. He served twice as cluster chair of workforce management for INFORMS annual meetings. His other research interests include warehousing and fulfillment in supply chains. Liming Liu (“ An Optimal Policy for Joint Dynamic Price and Lead-Time Quotation ”) is a chair professor of operations management at Hong Kong Lingnan University. Previously he was a professor of operations management at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests focus on logistics and supply chain management. He also works in the areas of shipping, maritime studies, and health-care management. Xiaoming Liu (“ An Optimal Policy for Joint Dynamic Price and Lead-Time Quotation ”) is an associate professor of management at the University of Macau, China. Her research interest is in the modeling and solution of optimization problems with applications in supply chain management, health care, and hospitality management. Konstantin Miller (“ The Worst-Case Efficiency of Cost Sharing Methods in Resource Allocation Games ”) is a Ph.D. student in the Telecommunication Networks Group at Technical University Berlin. His research interests include combinatorial optimization and game theory, with special focus on communication networks. Javad Nasiry (“ Dynamic Pricing with Loss-Averse Consumers and Peak-End Anchoring ”) is an assistant professor in the Information Systems, Business Statistics and Operations Management (ISOM) Department at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests lie in the area of behavioral operations and contract theory. The current paper is part of his Ph.D. dissertation at INSEAD and stems from a broader agenda that uses modeling and experimental approaches to study realistic behavior in operational contexts. Amedeo Odoni (“ Optimal Selection of Airport Runway Configurations ”) is professor of aeronautics and astronautics, professor of civil and environmental engineering, and a codirector of the Airline Industry Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has also served as codirector of the FAA's National Center of Excellence in Aviation Education, codirector of the Operations Research Center at MIT, editor of Transportation Science, and consultant to numerous international airport and aviation-related organizations. His recent books include the bestselling textbook Airport Systems: Planning, Design and Management (McGraw-Hill 2003) coauthored with Richard de Neufville, and The Global Airline Industry (John Wiley & Sons 2009) coedited with Peter Belobaba and Cynthia Barnhart. Ioana Popescu (“ Dynamic Pricing with Loss-Averse Consumers and Peak-End Anchoring ”) is the Booz & Company Professor in Revenue Management and associate professor of decision sciences at INSEAD, Singapore. Her research interests are in pricing and revenue management, behavioral operations, and moment problems. This paper is part of a larger research program that incorporates realistic customer behavior in pricing and revenue management. Warren B. Powell (“ Optimal Energy Commitments with Storage and Intermittent Supply ”) is a professor in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1981. He is the director of CASTLE Laboratory ( http://www.castlelab.princeton.edu ), which specializes in the development of stochastic optimization models and algorithms with applications in transportation and logistics, energy, health, and finance. The author/coauthor of over 170 refereed publications, he is an INFORMS Fellow and the author of Approximate Dynamic Programming: Solving the Curses of Dimensionality (John Wiley & Sons). His primary research interests are in approximate dynamic programming for high-dimensional applications, optimal learning (the efficient collection of information), and their application in energy systems analysis and transportation. He is a recipient of the Wagner Prize and has twice been a finalist in the prestigious Edelman competition. He has served in a variety of editorial and administrative positions for INFORMS, including INFORMS Board of Directors, area editor for Operations Research, president of the Transportation Science Section, and numerous prize and administrative committees. Maurice Queyranne (“ Rational Generating Functions and Integer Programming Games ”) is the Advisory Council Professor in Operations and Logistics at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. His research and teaching interests range from methodology, particularly discrete optimization and game theory, to operations management, in particular supply chain and health-care management. Christopher Thomas Ryan (“ Rational Generating Functions and Integer Programming Games ”) is an assistant professor at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. His research interests include algorithmic game theory, discrete optimization, and health-care operations. Amitabh Sinha (“ Integrated Optimization of Procurement, Processing, and Trade of Commodities ”) is an assistant professor of operations and management science at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. His research interests are in supply chain management, logistics, and applications of networks and combinatorics in operations. Yves Smeers (“ Generation Capacity Expansion in a Risky Environment: A Stochastic Equilibrium Analysis ”) is Professor Emeritus at the School of Engineering of the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. He is a researcher in CORE at the same university. He is scientific advisor at the Department of Economic Studies and Modelling (Centre d'Expertise en Etudes et Modélisation Economiques) of GDF Suez and a Fellow at the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge (Management Science Group). He graduated in engineering and economics from the universities of Liège and Louvain in Belgium, respectively, and obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon University. His career has focused on the modeling and economic analysis of electricity and gas markets. C. L. Smith (“ A Study of Interactions in the Risk Assessment of Complex Engineering Systems: An Application to Space PSA ”) is a key member of the Idaho National Laboratory's Risk, Reliability and NRC Programs Department. His primary duties and responsibilities are to lead risk and reliability methods research and development efforts and applied engineering projects for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Department of Energy (DOE). He has made significant contributions in the way that NASA views risk and performs risk assessment. His work through the multimillion-dollar project for NASA Headquarters Office of Safety and Mission Assurance has been a major factor in reshaping the use of PRA for NASA's high-profile manned and unmanned space projects, including developing probabilistic risk-assessment models in SAPHIRE, assisting in the development of a risk-informed decision-making guidebook, and completing a NASA guidebook on Bayesian inference for risk and reliability. He obtained his undergraduate degree (B.S.) from Idaho State University (ISU). He continued his education at ISU and completed a nuclear engineering M.S. He completed his Ph.D. and doctoral thesis work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focusing on formal decision-making activities at nuclear power plants. George Steiner (“ Revised Delivery-Time Quotation in Scheduling with Tardiness Penalties ”) received his Ph.D. in combinatorics and optimization from the University of Waterloo in 1982 and his M.Sc. in mathematics from Loránd Eötvös University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1971. After working in industry for almost 10 years, he joined the Faculty of Business at McMaster University in 1981, where he has been a full professor since 1992. His research interests include scheduling, algorithms on graphs and partially ordered sets, and combinatorial optimization. He has published in numerous scientific journals including Operations Research, Management Science, IIE Transactions, SIAM Journal on Computing, SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, Mathematics of Operations Research, Discrete Applied Mathematics, Annals of Operations Research, Journal of Graph Theory, Journal of Algorithms, and Theoretical Computer Science. Alexander L. Stolyar (“ Shadow-Routing Based Control of Flexible Multiserver Pools in Overload ”) is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in the Industrial Mathematics and Operations Research Department of Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, Murray Hill, New Jersey. His research interests are in queueing networks, stochasic processes, and stochastic modeling of communication and service networks. The present paper is primarily motivated by applications to large-scale contact centers. It is part of the author's research in the general area of optimal control of queueing networks. Tolga Tezcan (“ Shadow-Routing Based Control of Flexible Multiserver Pools in Overload ”) is an assistant professor of operations management at the Simon Graduate School of Business at the University of Rochester. His research interests are in asymptotic analysis and optimal control of large queuing systems with applications in service systems. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in industrial and systems engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2006. J. S. H. van Leeuwaarden (“ Refining Square-Root Safety Staffing by Expanding Erlang C ”) is associate professor of probability theory and stochastic networks in Eindhoven University of Technology, and research fellow of the research institute EURANDOM. He received the INFORMS Telecommunication Dissertation Award (2008), a Veni Grant (2006–2009) from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and a Starting Grant (2010–2015) from the European Research Council. Ren-Her Wang (“ Efficient Simulation of Value at Risk with Heavy-Tailed Risk Factors ”) is an assistant professor in the Department of Banking and Finance, Tamkang University, Taiwan. His research interests are in derivatives pricing, risk management, and efficient computational methods. This paper reflects part of his continuing interest and effort in constructing efficient simulation schemes. Xinghao Yan (“ Decentralized Inventory Sharing with Asymmetric Information ”) is an assistant professor in management science at Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario. His research interests are in information asymmetry/information sharing, inventory sharing, supplier selection, quality competition, and health-care operations. Rui Zhang (“ Revised Delivery-Time Quotation in Scheduling with Tardiness Penalties ”) obtained his Ph.D. degree at the DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in June 2010. His research focuses on supply chain scheduling, especially due date and logistics coordination. He applies a variety of methodologies such as computational complexity theory, combinatorial optimization, and design and analysis of approximation algorithms in his research. Hui Zhao (“ Decentralized Inventory Sharing with Asymmetric Information ”) is an assistant professor of management at Krannert School of Management, Purdue University. Her research interests are in the areas of supply chain management, collaboration in decentralized systems, pharmaceutical supply chains, and information sharing. She teaches business analytics, supply chain management, and pharmaceutical supply chains. Bert Zwart (“ Refining Square-Root Safety Staffing by Expanding Erlang C ”) received his Ph.D. at Eindhoven University of Technology in 2001 and held appointments at INRIA, Eindhoven, and Georgia Institute of Technology before moving to the Center of Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) in Amsterdam. At CWI he leads the Probability and Stochastic Networks Group. He is a professor at VU University Amsterdam and is also affiliated at EURANDOM and Georgia Tech. His honors include an IBM Faculty Award, the Erlang Prize, and VENI and VIDI awards from the Dutch Science Foundation (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, NWO). He is area editor for stochastic models at Operations Research and is coeditor in chief of the new journal Surveys in OR/MS.