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

Customer Satisfaction and Pricing in E-Retail Delivery

We study a system in which a common delivery fleet provides service to both same-day delivery (SDD) and next-day delivery (NDD) orders placed by e-retail customers who are sensitive to delivery prices. We develop a model of the system and optimize with respect to two separate objectives. First, empirical research suggests that fulfilling e-retail orders … Read more

Copositive Duality for Discrete Energy Markets

Optimization problems with discrete decisions are nonconvex and thus lack strong duality, which limits the usefulness of tools such as shadow prices. It was shown in Burer (2009) that mixed-binary quadratic programs can be written as completely positive programs, which are convex. Completely positive reformulations of discrete optimization problems therefore have strong duality if a … Read more

Integrated Pricing and Routing on a Network

We consider an integrated pricing and routing problem on a network. The problem is motivated by applications in freight transportation such as package delivery and less-than-truckload shipping services. The decision maker sets a price for each origin-destination pair of the network, which determines the demand flow that needs to be served. The flows are then … Read more

Joint Pricing and Production: A Fusion of Machine Learning and Robust Optimization

We integrate machine learning with distributionally robust optimization to address a two-period problem for the joint pricing and production of multiple items. First, we generalize the additive demand model to capture both cross-product and cross-period effects as well as the demand dependence across periods. Next, we apply K-means clustering to the demand residual mapping based … Read more

Branch-and-cut-and-price for the Cardinality-constrained Multi-cycle Problem in Kidney Exchange

The establishment of kidney exchange programs has dramatically improved rates for kidney transplants by matching donors to compatible patients who would otherwise fail to receive a kidney for transplant. Rather than simply swapping kidneys between two patient-donor pairs, having multiple patient-donors pairs simultaneously donate kidneys in a cyclic manner enables all participants to receive a … Read more

Optimal Design of Retailer-Prosumer Electricity Tariffs Using Bilevel Optimization

We compare various flexible tariffs that have been proposed to cost-effectively govern a prosumer’s electricity management – in particular time-of-use (TOU), critical-peak-pricing (CPP), and a real-time-pricing tariff (RTP). As the outside option, we consider a fixed-price tariff (FP) that restricts the specific characteristics of TOU, CPP, and RTP, so that the flexible tariffs are at … Read more

Pricing for Delivery Time Flexibility

We study a variant of the multi-period vehicle routing problem, in which a service provider offers a discount to customer in exchange for delivery flexibility. We establish theoretical properties and empirical insights regarding the intricate and complex relation between the benefit from additional delivery flexibility, the discounts offered to customers to gain additional delivery flexibility, … Read more

Pricing in Multi-Interval Real-Time Markets

This paper examines multi-interval real-time markets in the context of US independent system operators (ISOs). We show that current ISO implementations that settle only the upcoming interval of the multi-interval solution can create incentive problems. Fundamentally, this is the result of each successive optimization problem treating historical losses as sunk costs. To solve the incentive … Read more

The Impact of Potential-Based Physics Models on Pricing in Energy Networks

Pricing of access to energy networks is an important issue in liberalized energy sectors because of the natural monopoly character of the underlying transport infrastructures. We introduce a general pricing framework for potential-based energy flows in arbitrarily structured transport networks. In different specifications of our general pricing model we discuss first- and second-best pricing results … Read more