“Price-Image Effects In Multi-Product Pricing Under Competition”.

Department of Analytics and Operations

A short report from Wu Lan on her research findings presented in the conference.

I participated in the OR Workshop and the 16th POMS-HK International Conference held on January 2 to 4, 2026. The workshop and conference provided valuable exposure to both academic research and industry practice in operations research and analytics.

At the OR Workshop, I served as one of the masters of ceremonies, helping to host one of the mini-conferences. This role gave me the opportunity to interact closely with speakers, manage the flow of the session, and gain experience in moderating academic discussions.

I attended a number of talks from both universities and companies, covering applications of optimization, data analytics, and AI in logistics, supply chain, and pricing. These talks broadened my understanding of how OR tools are being deployed in practice, especially in large-scale industrial settings.

I also presented a research poster and was honored to receive the Best Student Poster Award, which was very encouraging and provided additional visibility for my work.

During the main 2026 POMS Hong Kong conference, I gave a contributed talk on my recent research on “Price-Image Effects In Multi-Product Pricing Under Competition”. In the presentation, I introduced a model where price image enters consumers’ utilities via a max–affine term, discussed how the resulting multi-product pricing problem can be reformulated as a convex optimization problem through a change of variables and a perspective transformation, and outlined the subsequent game-theoretic analysis of Nash equilibrium existence and uniqueness. The audience raised several insightful questions regarding the economic interpretation of the price-image term, possible extensions to richer demand models, and empirical calibration.

The feedback helped me clarify the assumptions in my model and identify directions for future robustness checks and empirical work.