Vehicle routing, Stacker crane, Swapping problem, Backhauls, Dial-a-ride problem, 90-02, 90B06,

No abstract

This paper introduces a hybrid algorithm for the dynamic dial-a-ride problem in which service requests arrive in real time. The hybrid algorithm combines an exact constraint programming algorithm and a tabu search heuristic. An important component of the tabu search heuristic consists of three scheduling procedures which are executed sequentially. Experiments show that the constraint programming algorithm is sometimes able to accept or reject incoming requests, and that the hybrid method outperforms each of the two algorithms when they are executed alone.

Social influence has been shown to create significant unpredictability in cultural markets, providing one potential explanation why experts routinely fail at predicting commercial success of cultural products. As a result, social influence is often presented in a negative light. Here, we show the benefits of social influence for cultural markets. We present a policy that uses product quality, appeal, position bias and social influence to maximize expected profits in the market. Our computational experiments show that our profit-maximizing policy leverages social influence to produce significant performance benefits for the market, while our theoretical analysis proves that our policy outperforms in expectation any policy not displaying social signals. Our results contrast with earlier work which focused on showing the unpredictability and inequalities created by social influence. Not only do we show for the first time that, under our policy, dynamically showing consumers positive social signals increases the expected profit of the seller in cultural markets. We also show that, in reasonable settings, our profit-maximizing policy does not introduce significant unpredictability and identifies “blockbusters”. Overall, these results shed new light on the nature of social influence and how it can be leveraged for the benefits of the market.