Dr. Jian Yang

Department of Management Science and Information Systems, Rutgers Business School, Rutgers University

Biography:

Dr. Jian Yang obtained his Ph.D. in Management Science from the University of Texas at Austin. After working for the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology, he is now a professor at the Department of Management Science and Information Systems, Rutgers Business School, Rutgers University. Dr. Yang’s research interests are in combinatorial optimization, logistics, production and inventory control, dynamic pricing, and game theory. At the present he is particularly interested in the role played by risk and ambiguity in dynamic inventory-price control and game-theoretical settings.

Session Title: Discrete-item Inventory Control involving Unknown Censored Demand and Convex Inventory Costs

Abstract:

We study inventory control when unsatisfied demand requests are lost. In a long-run average framework, we suppose little is known about the underlying demand distribution. The presence of censoring, the fact that demand realizations have no guarantees of being observed, makes the problem of learning while operating difficult. In our discrete-item setting, we find another complicating factor in the form of strictly convex inventory costs. Still, both a lower bound and a matching upper bound can be established for the time growth of the problem’s regret. For a given policy, the latter measures the difference between the total average cost incurred by it and that incurred by a policy optimally tailored to the underlying demand distribution if it were known. The regret bound reached by our policy would remain valid even after accounting for the nonperisability of product items. Numerical experiments further illustrate the relative competitiveness of our policy.