Columbia IEOR’s Achievements at INFORMS 2025

The Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) at Columbia University presents notable successes at the  recent INFORMS annual meeting, which took place in Atlanta, GA, from October 25-29, 2025.

IEOR faculty member Adam Elmachtoub, IEOR Ph.D. alumnus Xiao Lei, and Maxime Cohen from McGill University won the INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing (RMP) Section Prize. Their paper, "Price Discrimination with Fairness Constraints," is available here. The INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Prize is awarded for the best contribution to the science of pricing and revenue management published in English. Learn more about Professor Elmachtoub’s research here. 

Brian Zhu, a Ph.D. student focused on financial engineering, achieved 2nd place in the INFORMS Best Student Paper Competition in Finance. His research, which shows that more liquidity providers can paradoxically reduce overall liquidity in decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges, is available here. 

Ph.D student Jiaqi Shi was a finalist for the INFORMS IBM Best Student Paper Award in Service Science, with his research concentrating on improving service systems and operational efficiencies. His work, which is available here, demonstrates that simple, fixed pricing works surprisingly well for services with limited reusable resources (like cloud computing, car rentals, or Airbnb). While constantly changing prices based on demand is theoretically optimal, this research shows that one flat price delivers 79–90% of the revenue that complex dynamic pricing would.

Ayoub Foussoul and Chengyue He received an honorable mention in the INFORMS Optimization Society 2025 Student Paper Prize for their work, "Minimum Cut Representability of Stable Matching Problems." This paper develops a framework for solving matching problems like assigning students to schools by converting them into so-called network flow problems.  Read their paper here. 

Postdoctoral researcher Devansh Jalota was recognized as a finalist in the INFORMS Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) Paper Competition. This paper proves that simple, fixed pricing works surprisingly well for services with limited reusable resources (like cloud computing, car rentals, or Airbnb). While constantly changing prices based on demand is theoretically optimal, the authors show that charging one flat price delivers 79–90% of the revenue that complex dynamic pricing would—making static pricing a practical and effective strategy that's easier to implement and better received by customers.

These accomplishments underscore the IEOR department's dedication to advancing knowledge and delivering informed, benefit-driven solutions to complex global challenges.