We study the out-of-sample properties of robust empirical optimization problems with smooth φ-divergence penalties and smooth concave objective functions, and develop a theory for data-driven calibration of the non-negative “robustness parameter” δ that controls the size of the deviations...

In this paper, we study the out-of-sample properties of robust empirical optimization and develop a theory for data-driven calibration of the “robustness parameter” for worst-case maximization problems with concave reward functions. Building on the intuition that robust optimization reduces...

We formulate a distributionally robust optimization problem where the deviation of the alternative distribution is controlled by a φ-divergence penalty in the objective, and show that a large class of these problems are essentially equivalent to a mean-variance problem. We also show that while...

We formulate a distributionally robust optimization problem where the empirical distribution plays the role of the nominal model, the decision maker optimizes against a worst-case alternative, and the deviation of the alternative distribution from the nominal is controlled by a $\phi$-divergence...

This paper concerns dynamic pricing of multiple perishable products when there is model uncertainty, which we formulate as a worst-case stochastic intensity control problem where ambiguity is modeled using the notion of relative entropy. One feature of our formulation is that the demand models...