William L. Cooper
Professor
William L. Cooper
Professor
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Professor
Professor
My research focuses on using operations research models to develop and analyze heuristic and optimal solution approaches for complex problems in pricing and revenue management. I seek to generate models, insights, and methods relevant to the operation of actual systems, and to maintain a high level of mathematical rigor in the analysis of the models themselves.
Recently, my work has focused on building and analyzing models to determine prices for products that exhibit network effects. A product is said to experience network effects if individual consumers value it more when more other consumers purchase it. The expansion of social media has led to the emergence of new products that display network effects (e.g., multi-player online video games, group buying deals). Consequently, problems involving such products have recently taken on great importance. To address these problems, we must resolve many interesting technical questions. Some such questions arise because products' sales levels are not explicit functions of prices, but rather emerge as solutions of fixed point conditions in our model of network effects. My ongoing research on this topic has been supported by an NSF grant (with Zizhuo Wang) entitled "Revenue Management with Network Effects".
Please visit Professor Cooper's personal website for more information as well as links to publications.
William L. Cooper is a Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at University of Minnesota. His research and teaching interests include revenue management and stochastic models.
Professor Cooper joined University of Minnesota in 1999 after obtaining a BA in Mathematics from University of Pennsylvania in 1993 and a PhD in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1999. His research has been published in top journals including Operations Research, Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and Production and Operations Management. He is currently an Associate Editor for Stochastic Systems, and was previously an Associate Editor for Operations Research and for Management Science. He was also previously the Department Editor for Revenue Management at Production and Operations Management. Prof. Cooper has received several National Science Foundation research grants. He was the Chair of the INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section in 2010-11 and was the Program Chair for the 2013 INFORMS Annual Meeting, which was held in Minneapolis.
PhD, Industrial Engineering, Georgia Tech, 1999
BA, Mathematics, University of Pennsylvania, 1993
Please visit Professor Cooper's personal website for links to the papers below.