HEC Montréal

About: HEC Montréal is a education organization based out in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Context (language use) & Vehicle routing problem. The organization has 1221 authors who have published 5708 publications receiving 196862 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Montreal & HEC Montreal.

Consistency in multi-vehicle inventory-routing

Abstract: Inventory-routing problems (IRPs) arise in vendor-managed inventory systems. They require jointly solving a vehicle routing problem and an inventory management problem. Whereas the solutions they yield tend to benefit the vendor and customers, solving IRPs solely based on cost considerations may lead to inconveniences to both parties. These are related to the fleet size and vehicle load, to the frequency of the deliveries, and to the quantities delivered. In order to alleviate these problems, we introduce the concept of consistency in IRP solutions, thus increasing quality of service. We formulate the multi-vehicle IRP, with and without consistency requirements, as mixed integer linear programs, and we propose a matheuristic for their solution. This heuristic applies an adaptive large neighborhood search scheme in which some subproblems are solved exactly. The proposed algorithm generates solutions offering a good compromise between cost and quality. We analyze the effect of different inventory policies, routing decisions and delivery sizes.

Consumer Racism and Its Effects on Domestic Cross-Ethnic Product Purchase: An Empirical Test in the United States, Canada, and France

Abstract: This study provides empirical evidence of the effects of consumer racism on domestic cross-ethnic product purchase in three countries. The model predicts that consumer racism will affect ethnic majorities' judgments of and willingness to buy products from each country's dominant ethnic minority. After a consumer racism measurement instrument is developed and validated, experiments and survey results show that varying levels of consumer racism affect consumer judgments of and willingness to buy domestic products that are perceived as being made by ethnic minorities in the three countries in which the tests took place. Moreover, the results indicate that minority-owned business performance is significantly and negatively affected in areas in which consumer racism is more prevalent. Moderators of consumer racism effects are the perceived level of interaction between consumers and the minority-owned company, a certain product-ethnicity image, and consumers' perceived importance of the outcome associa...

A unified framework for dynamic pari-mutuel information market design

Abstract: Recently, coinciding with and perhaps driving the increased popularity of prediction markets, several novel pari-mutuel mechanisms have been developed such as the logarithmic market scoring rule (LMSR), the cost-function formulation of market makers, and the sequential convex parimutuel mechanism (SCPM). In this work, we present a unified convex optimization framework which connects these seemingly unrelated models for centrally organizing contingent claims markets. The existing mechanisms can be expressed in our unified framework using classic utility functions. We also show that this framework is equivalent to a convex risk minimization model for the market maker. This facilitates a better understanding of the risk attitudes adopted by various mechanisms. The utility framework also leads to easy implementation since we can now find the useful cost function of a market maker in polynomial time through the solution of a simple convex optimization problem.In addition to unifying and explaining the existing mechanisms, we use the generalized framework to derive necessary and sufficient conditions for many desirable properties of a prediction market mechanism such as proper scoring, truthful bidding (in a myopic sense), efficient computation, controllable risk-measure, and guarantees on the worst-case loss. As a result, we develop the first proper, truthful, risk controlled, loss-bounded (in number of states) mechanism; none of the previously proposed mechanisms possessed all these properties simultaneously. Thus, our work could provide an effective tool for designing new market mechanisms.