Program
The workshop is accessible through EC’s Gather environment, details here. We are in Room B.
All times PT. Timings may be updated. During the breaks we will host informal chats on Gather.
| 7:50 - 8 am | Welcome |
| 8 - 8:45 am | Keynote 1: Karen Smilowitz Title: Building optimization models with community partners: rethinking student assignment in public school districts. Operations research methods have been used to identify and evaluate solutions to the reconfiguration of public school attendance area boundaries for over fifty years. Over time, these methods have evolved with increases in computational power and the need to address a broader range of factors in decision making. There has also been a greater focus on engagement with partners in the community and school districts. The talk will present an ongoing collaboration with community and school district partners focused on student assignment. We will present an overview of the process and the interactive optimization and data visualization tool used to facilitate discussions. |
| 9 - 10:10 am | Technical Session 1: Behavioral aspects of decision-making and operations - Hongyao Ma, Reshef Meir, David C. Parkes and Elena Wu-Yan. Penalty Bidding Mechanisms for Allocating Resources and Overcoming Present Bias - Olumurejiwa Fatunde, Andre Calmon, Joann de Zegher and Gonzalo Romero. The value of long-term relationships when selling to informal retailers - Evidence from India - Hamsa Bastani, Osbert Bastani and Park Sinchaisri. Learning Best Practices: Can Machine Learning Improve Human Decision-Making? - David Lee and Christos Makridis. Towards a model of human collaboration and computation |
| 10:20 - 11:30 am | Technical Session 2: Incentives in Platforms and Marketplaces - Chen Jin, Bowen Lou and Jiding Zhang. To Mine or to Trade? An Empirical Study of Bitcoin Exchange and Mining Markets - Francisco Castro, Peter Frazier, Hongyao Ma, Hamid Nazerzadeh and Chiwei Yan. Matching Queues, Flexibility and Incentives - Paula Kayongo, Glenn Sun, Jason Hartline and Jessica Hullman. Visualization Equilibrium - Mark Sellke and Aleksandrs Slivkins. The Price of Incentivizing Exploration: A Characterization via Thompson Sampling and Sample Complexity |
| 12:30 - 1:15 pm | Keynote 2: Sean Meyn Title: Irrational Agents and the Power Grid - Does ERCOT 2021 Teach Us Something New? For decades, power systems academics have proclaimed the need for real time prices to create a more efficient energy grid. The rationale is economics 101: proper price signals will lead to an efficient outcome. The mathematics is elegant — who doesn’t love Lagrange multipliers? However, application of this mathematics to electric power markets cannot be justified. This harsh assessment is based on a casual review of economics 101; in particular, the definition of efficiency. The conclusions of the power economist are correct if the population of rational power consuming agents have a concave utility function that models preference for electric power. However, in the real world, a typical user of electric power knows this is absurd. Look at any of the big power consumers at your own home: is your personal welfare a continuous function of the electric power consumed by each device? The absurdity is most clear for on-off loads such as a water heater, refrigerator, A/C or pool pump. The creation of a realistic economic model requires that we talk to humans. We might learn that a particular agent uses a refrigerator to keep food cold, and a water heater to help keep their family and their dishes clean. It follows that the electrical energy products of interest to this agent are complex functions of time, and only loosely related to electric power – the quantity associated with price signals, and in particular the price surges witnessed at ERCOT this year and in 2011. There is a longer history in the communications sector where surge pricing was promoted, and then dismissed based on similar reasoning. To realize a reliable energy grid and to promote innovation, we must abandon the dogma of surge pricing. Alternatives will be surveyed in the lecture. |
| 1:30 - 2:40 pm | Technical Session 3: Social and non-profit sector operations - Pia Ramchandani, Hamsa Bastani and Emily Wyatt. Unmasking sex trafficking supply chains with machine learning - Jamie Kang, Faidra Monachou, Moran Koren and Itai Ashlagi. Counterbalancing Learning and Strategic Incentives in Allocation Markets - Timothy Chan, Nicholas Howard, Saman Lagzi, Bernardo Quiroga and Gonzalo Romero. Negative Spillover on Service Level across Priority Classes: Evidence from a Radiology Workflow Platform - Sean Sinclair, Siddhartha Banerjee and Christina Yu. Sequential Fair Allocation: Achieving the Optimal Envy-Efficiency Tradeoff Curve |
| 3 - 3:45 pm | Panel: Ashish Goel, Karen Zheng, Dominic Coey |
| 3:45 - 4:45 pm | Poster + Networking session on Gather |