CBA Distinguished Speaker: Professor Omar Besbes (Columbia)

You’re invited to the UIC College of Business Distinguished Speaker Seminar by Omar Besbes, the Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Business at Columbia University.

Time: 2-3:30 p.m.

Location: UH 2450

Talk title: “How big should your data really be?”

Data-driven decision-making is a central paradigm in the modern “algorithmic economy.” Yet, there are limited theoretical foundations for most data sizes that often arise in practice. In this talk, we discuss two fundamental questions aiming at addressing this gap: how much data is needed to operate “effectively,” and  how should a decision-maker construct a mapping from historical data to decisions? We discuss various central problem classes across disciplines, such as pricing and capacity planning, together with different associated data structures, ranging from market research data to transaction data. We present recent results that capture the interplay between data and the decisions they support and ultimately enable us to quantify (robustly) achievable performance across data sizes, small and big. These results yield fundamental practical insights into the economics of data sizes: in many applications, a little data can go a long way in optimizing decisions.

Besbes is the Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Business at Columbia University, where he is a member of the decision, risk and operations division in the Graduate School of Business. He is also a member of the Data Science Institute.  His primary research interests are in the area of data-driven decision-making with a focus on applications in the algorithmic economy and modern marketplaces. His research has been recognized by multiple prizes, including the 2019 Frederick W. Lanchester Prize, the 2017 M&SOM Society Young Scholar Prize, the 2013 M&SOM Best Paper Award, and the 2012 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Prize. He has served on the editorial boards of Management Science and Operations Research. Over the years, he has taught core MBA courses in operations management and business analytics, an MBA elective on advanced business analytics, and various PhD seminars on stochastic models, revenue management and data-driven decision-making. He is a recipient of the Dean’s Award for teaching excellence in the core at Columbia Business School. He is a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique (France) and received a M.Sc. from Stanford University in 2000 and a PhD from Columbia University in 2008. Before joining Columbia, he was on the faculty at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.