Randomized Robust Price Optimization

The robust multi-product pricing problem is to determine the prices of a collection of products so as to maximize the worst-case revenue, where the worst case is taken over an uncertainty set of demand models that the firm expects could be realized in practice. A tacit assumption in this approach is that the pricing decision … Read more

Revisiting Capacity Market Fundamentals

Many liberalized electricity markets use capacity mechanisms to ensure that sufficient resources will be available in advance of operations. Recent events have called into question the ability of capacity mechanisms to provide sufficient incentives for reliability. A core challenge is that penalties for non-performance on capacity obligations are lower than what theory would suggest is … Read more

New Formulations and Pricing Mechanisms for Stochastic Electricity Market Clearing Problem

We present new formulations of the stochastic electricity market clearing problem based on the principles of stochastic programming. Previous analyses have established that the canonical stochastic programming model effectively captures the relationship between the day-ahead and real-time dispatch and prices. The resulting quantities exhibit desirable guarantees of revenue adequacy, cost recovery, and price distortion in … Read more

Political districting to optimize the Polsby-Popper compactness score with application to voting rights

In the academic literature and in expert testimony, the Polsby-Popper score is the most popular way to measure the compactness of a political district. Given a district with area \(A\) and perimeter \(P\), its Polsby-Popper score is given by \( (4 \pi A)/P^2\). This score takes values between zero and one, with circular districts achieving … Read more

On the equilibrium prices of a regular locally Lipschitz exchange economy

We extend classical results by Debreu and Dierker about equilibrium prices of a regular economy with continuously differentiable demand functions/excess demand function to a regular exchange economy with these functions being locally Lipschitz. Our concept of a regular economy is based on Clarke’s concept of regular value and we show that such a regular economy … Read more

Maximum Likelihood Probability Measures over Sets and Applications to Data-Driven Optimization

Motivated by data-driven approaches to sequential decision-making under uncertainty, we study maximum likelihood estimation of a distribution over a general measurable space when, unlike traditional setups, realizations of the underlying uncertainty are not directly observable but instead are known to lie within observable sets. While extant work studied the special cases when the observed sets … Read more

Modeling risk for CVaR-based decisions in risk aggregation

Title Modeling risk for CVaR-based decisions in risk aggregation. Abstract Measuring the risk aggregation is an important exercise for any risk bearing carrier. It is not restricted to evaluation of the known portfolio risk position only, and could include complying with regulatory requirements, diversification, etc. The main difficulty of risk aggregation is creating an underlying … Read more

Worst-Case Conditional Value at Risk for Asset Liability Management: A Novel Framework for General Loss Functions

Asset-liability management (ALM) is a challenging task faced by pension funds due to the uncertain nature of future asset returns and interest rates. To address this challenge, this paper presents a new mathematical model that uses aWorst-case Conditional Value-at-Risk (WCVaR) constraint to ensure that the funding ratio remains above a regulator-mandated threshold with a high … Read more

Water resources management: A bibliometric analysis and future research directions

The stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP) algorithm introduced by Pereira and Pinto in 1991 has sparked essential research in the context of water resources management, mainly due to its ability to address large-scale multistage stochastic problems. This paper aims to provide a tutorial-type review of 32 years of research since the publication of the SDDP … Read more

Fair stochastic vehicle routing with partial deliveries

A common assumption in the models for the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands is that all demands must be satisfied. This is achieved by including recourse actions in two-stage stochastic programming formulations or by ensuring with a high probability that all demand fits within the vehicle capacity (chance-constrained formulations). In this work, we relax … Read more