O.R. researchers and practitioners are constantly churning out papers that tackle a wide variety of important and hard-to-solve practical problems. On one hand, as a researcher, I understand how difficult these problems can be and how it’s often the case that fancy math and complex algorithms need to be used. On the other hand, as someone who teaches optimization to MBA students who aren’t easily excited by mathematics, I’m always looking for motivational examples that are both interesting and not too complex to be understood in 5 minutes. (That’s the little slot of time I reserve at the beginning of my lectures to go over an application before the lecture itself starts.)
Every now and then, I come across a paper that fits the bill perfectly: it addresses an important problem, produces impactful results, and (here comes the rare part), accomplishes the previous two goals by using math that my MBA students can follow 100%, while being confident that they themselves could replicate it given what they learned in my course (the optimization models).
The paper to which I’m referring has recently appeared in Operations Research (Articles in Advance, January 2017): The Impact of Linear Optimization on Promotion Planning, by Maxime C. Cohen, Ngai-Hang Zachary Leung, Kiran Panchamgam, Georgia Perakis, and Anthony Smith (http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.2016.1573).
If I had to pick one word to describe this paper, it would be BEAUTIFUL.
I immediately proceeded to put together a 5-minute summary presentation (8 slides) to cover the problem, approach, and results. I’ll be showing this to 100 of my MBA students on this coming Tuesday (Valentine’s Day!). I hope they love it as much as I did. Feel free to show this presentation to your own students if you wish, and let me know how it went down in the comments.
A recent Poets & Quants article explains how business schools with the highest quality teaching strive to bring their faculty’s research into the classroom so that students get to learn the latest and greatest ideas. The O.R. paper above is a perfect example of when this can be done effectively.
O.R. by the Beach 