Survey of Dynamic Resource-Constrained Reward Collection Problems: Unified Model and Analysis

Abstract

Dynamic resource allocation problems arise under a variety of settings. In “Survey of Dynamic Resource-Constrained Reward Collection Problems: Unified Model and Analysis,” Balseiro, Besbes, and Pizarro introduce a unifying model for a large class of dynamic optimization problems dubbed dynamic resource-constrained reward collection (DRC2) problems. Surveying the literature, they show that this class encompasses a variety of disparate and classical problems typically studied separately, such as dynamic pricing with capacity constraints, dynamic bidding with budgets, network revenue management, online matching, or order fulfillment. Furthermore, they establish that the DRC2 class is amenable to analysis by characterizing the performance of a central, certainty-equivalent heuristic. Notably, they provide a novel unifying analysis that isolates the drivers of performance, recovers as corollaries some existing specialized results, generalizes other existing results by weakening the assumptions required, and yields new results in specialized settings for which no such characterization was available.