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Will Ma

Assistant Professor
Decision, Risk, and Operations (DRO) division
Graduate School of Business, Columbia University

Email: wm2428 (at) gsb (dot) columbia (dot) edu
Office: Kravis 951

Will's picture 


Hi! I am an assistant professor in the Decision, Risk, and Operations division at Columbia Business School. Prior to July 2019, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Google Research. In July 2018, I received my Ph.D. from the MIT Operations Research Center.

I spent 2013-2015 as a co-founder of Lunarch Studios, the start-up that designed the strategy game Prismata. During those years, I had also been a research intern at Google, and a trading intern at Jane Street Capital.

I completed my undergraduate degree in 2010 from the University of Waterloo, majoring in Pure Mathematics and Combinatorics/Optimization. During that time, I competed in many international poker tournaments. In 2011 I founded the annual poker class at MIT, which can be accessed on MIT OpenCourseWare.

Research

My research focuses on the theory of Online Algorithms and its implications for models in Revenue Management. I have also worked on single-shot Revenue Maximization problems related to mechanism design, and some Other areas. Recently, I have been interested in designing algorithms from samples/predictions, motivated by the large-scale data available in e-commerce fulfillment applications.

Algorithms from Samples/Predictions

E-commerce Fulfillment

Online Algorithms

Keywords include: Prophet Inequalities, Online Matching, Stochastic Knapsack, Multi-secretary Regret

Revenue Management

Keywords include: Dynamic Pricing/Assortment, Product Ranking, Recommendations, Reusable Resources, Single-leg Revenue Management, Multi-stage Assortment Optimization

Single-shot Revenue Maximization

Keywords include: Assortment Optimization, Mechanism Design, Bundling

Other

Models for Social Applications

Optimization Theory

Video Games

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