The Role of Ease-of-Return Experience on Contingent Free Shipping Policies
Contingent free shipping (CFS) policies, whereby consumers get free shipping if their orders exceed a certain amount, are commonplace. A CFS policy aims to nudge customers to place larger orders by adding additional items and/or buying more expensive items (order-swelling). However, a less desirable possible outcome is that customers pad their
orders to avoid paying the shipping fee but then return the opportunistic/impulse-purchase items later (return-swelling).
Evolution of Ride Services: From Ride- Hailing to Autonomous Vehicles
In recent years the ride service industry has been evolving rapidly, driven by disruptive technologies such as mobile apps, AI, and autonomous vehicles (AVs). While platform-based decentralized ride hailing companies have gained significant market share, vertically-integrated robotaxi services using emerging AVs are starting to enter the market. In this paper, we aim to provide insights about the evolution and the future of ride services studying these two competing business approaches.
Stochastic Gradients: Optimization, Simulation, Randomization, and Sensitivity Analysis
Big data and high-dimensional optimization problems in operations research (OR) and artificial intelligence (AI) have brought stochastic gradients to the forefront. This article provides a view of research and applications in stochastic gradient estimation from multiple perspectives, as seminal advances have come from diverse and disparate research fields, including operations research/management science (OR/MS), industrial/systems engineering (ISE), optimal/stochastic control, statistics, and more recently from the computer science (CS) AI machine learning (ML) community.
Simulation Optimization and Artificial Intelligence
With the relentless increase in computing power and the ubiquitous availability of data in many industries, the fields of simulation optimization and artificial intelligence have emerged at the scientific and engineering forefront in their societal impact, manifested in the pervasiveness of technologies such as large language models, chatbots, digital twins, and agent-based systems. We examine cross-fertilization between simulation optimization and artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on reinforcement learning, highlighting research that has been mutually beneficial.