Dong Li

We consider a car rental network revenue management (RM) problem, accounting for the key operational characteristics of car rental services such as the varying length of rentals and mobility of inventories, which imply the intertemporal and spatial correlations of rental demands for inventories across different locations and days. The problem is formulated as an infinite‐horizon cyclic stochastic dynamic program to account for the time‐varying and cyclic nature of car rental businesses. To tackle the curse of dimensionality , we propose a Lagrangian relaxation (LR) approach with product‐ and time‐dependent Lagrangian multipliers to decomposing the dynamic network problem into multiple single‐station single‐day subproblems. We show that the Lagrangian dual problem is a convex program and then develop a subgradient‐based algorithm to solve the dual problem and derive an LR‐based bid price policy. To improve the scalability of the LR approach, we further propose three simpler LR‐based bid price policy variants with either location‐dependent or leadtime‐dependent Lagrangian multipliers, or both. Our numerical study indicates that the LR‐based bid price policies can outperform some commonly used heuristics. Using a set of real‐world booking data, we provide a case study in which we empirically demonstrate the operational characteristics of car rental services, calibrate the arrival process of booking requests using a Poisson regression model, and demonstrate that the LR‐based bid price policies indeed outperform other heuristics consistently in both in‐sample and out‐of‐sample horizons.

Morale issues are considered to be a major factor in preventing realization of organizational change. Employee’s morale during the organization change is known to depend upon trust in their management. Our previous study has provided a procedure for estimating the employees’ trust in their management and developed a multi-agent simulation model to demonstrate the change of the employees" states. This study modifies the model for estimating trust so that trust can be estimated with fewer independent variables and the prediction accuracy can be improved, which can also simplify the multi-agent simulation model. Simulation experiments are presented to analyze the relationship between the employees’ trust and the change of morale.