This paper deals with a basic issue: How does one approach the problem of designing the "right" objective for a given resource allocation problem? The notion of what is right can be fairly nebulous; we consider two issues that we see as key: efficiency and fairness. We approach the problem of...

We develop a theory that shows signaling a firm's fundamental quality (e.g., its operational capabilities) to lenders through inventory transactions to be more efficient---it leads to less costly operational distortions---than signaling through loan requests, and we characterize how the...

Choice models today are ubiquitous across a range of applications in operations and marketing. Real-world implementations of many of these models face the formidable stumbling block of simply identifying the "right" model of choice to use. Because models of choice are inherently high-dimensional...

We introduce the pathwise optimization (PO) method, a new convex optimization procedure to produce upper and lower bounds on the optimal value (the "price") of a high-dimensional optimal stopping problem. The PO method builds on a dual characterization of optimal stopping problems as...

We develop a new model for studying the phenomenon of congestion in a transient environment, focusing on the problem of aircraft landings at a busy "hub" airport. Our model is based on a Markov/semi-Markov treatment of changes in the weather, the principal source of uncertainty governing service...

We propose a new algorithm for solving integer programming (IP) problems that is based on ideas from algebraic geometry. The method provides a natural generalization of the Farkas lemma for IP, leads to a way of performing sensitivity analysis, offers a systematic enumeration of all feasible...

We present an Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) approach for the multidimensional knapsack problem (MKP). We approximate the value function (a) using parametric and nonparametric methods and (b)using a base-heuristic. We propose a new heuristic which adaptively rounds the solution of the...