Chair of Operations, Economics & Strategy

Selling Different Versions of the Same Product – Robustly!

Published:30.03.23 — Because consumers vary in their needs and their willingness-to-pay for them, companies offer different versions of the same product at different prices. A new research paper by PhD student Jun Han and Prof. Thomas Weber on “Price Discrimination with Robust Beliefs” develops a method with which companies can design and price product versions without having to know their consumer base exactly. The paper appeared in the April 2023 issue of the European Journal of Operational Research. The research results leverage the concept of “relative robustness,” which has been a longstanding research interest at the Chair of Operations, Economics and Strategy.

Learning to “sell” a prototype designed in just a few weeks

Published:17.03.23 — For the last four years at EPFL, a Master’s course jointly run by the College of Management of Technology and the School of Engineering has been winning over students seeking a course that meets the needs of local industry.

Performance is Relative: Implications for Robust Decision-Making

Published:16.02.23 — A new research paper by Prof. Weber on “Relatively Robust Decisions” examines decisions which attain the best relative performance across many random scenarios. The results, published in the January 2023 issue of Theory and Decision, a leading journal in the field of Decision Science, provide structural insights on this important decision-making problem.