No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

We study a sports scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing carry-over effects in round robin tournaments.In the first part, focusing on tournaments that allow minimum number of breaks (at most one) for each team, we formulate an integer programming model and provide an efficient heuristic algorithm to solve this computationally expensive problem. We apply the algorithm to the current Turkish Professional Football League and present an alternative scheduling template. In the second part, we discuss how the carry-over effects can be further decreased if the number of breaks is allowed to be of slightly larger value and numerically represent this trade-off.

Accounting for social network effects in marketing strategies has become an important issue. Taking a step back, we seek to incorporate and analyze social network effects on new product development and then propose a model to engineer product diffusion over a social network. We build upon the share‐of‐choice (SOC) problem, which is a strategic combinatorial optimization problem used commonly as one of the methods to analyze conjoint analysis data by marketers in order to identify a product with largest market share, and show how to incorporate social network effects in the SOC problem. We construct a genetic algorithm to solve this computationally challenging (NP‐Hard) problem and show that ignoring social network effects in the design phase results in a significantly lower market share for a product. In this setting, we introduce the secondary operational problem of determining the least expensive way of influencing individuals and strengthening product diffusion over a social network. This secondary problem is of independent interest, as it addresses contagion models and the issue of intervening in diffusion over a social network, which are of significant interest in marketing and epidemiological settings.