管理科学系学术讲座（7月21日）

时   间：2025年7月21日（周一） 14:00-15:30

地   点：管理学院思源楼524室

主题：Multi-product Newsvendor with Indifferent Demand

主讲人：Gar Goei Loke，Associate Professor，Durham University Business School

主持人：周明龙 复旦大学管理学院副教授

Abstract: In this work, we study the multi-product newsvendor model with indifferent demand. We define indifferent demand as the situation where customers demand a set of products and are satisfied by a single product from this set. Such form of demand flexibility can occur in shared products or service allocation contexts. We model the demand as a 2^N-dimensional random variable over the space of submodular set functions on N products. We exactly characterize the optimal solution. Specifically, optimal inventory levels should be decided greedily in decreasing order of price, and cost only affects the specific inventory levels. Furthermore, these inventory levels are the inverse distribution functions of the critical quantile, as in the traditional newsvendor problem, however under a distribution that adjusts for potential shortfall as a result of subsequent products and aggregating over the different combination of product sets that contain the relevant product. Our work opens the door to stochastic optimization over submodular random variables.

Bio:

Dr Gar Goei Loke is currently an associate professor with the operations management and operations research group at Durham University Business School. Prior to this, he has spent time as an assistant professor at both Rotterdam School of Management (Erasmus University) and National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Mathematics at NUS, under the tutelage of Prof Kim Chuan Toh and Prof Melvyn Sim. His research interests are in the area of robust optimization. More recently, he has started examining topics in data-driven optimization such as how to meld the predictive and prescriptive. While some of his works are theoretical, he also finds applications in healthcare, energy / utilities and public sector. He has publications in Operations Research and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. Prior to his career, he was the team lead of data science in the Prime Minister's Office, Singapore.