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Will Ma

Roderick H. Cushman Associate Professor
Decision, Risk, and Operations, Graduate School of Business
and Data Science Institute
Columbia University

Email: wm2428 (at) gsb (dot) columbia (dot) edu
Office: Kravis 951

I am currently on leave at Percepta.ai, building superhuman decision systems using AI agents and Operations Research.

Will's picture 

Research

I work on the theory of online algorithms and decision-making under uncertainty. I specialize in developing data-driven methods for problems in operations and revenue management, including inventory, e-commerce fulfillment, assortment optimization, and online resource allocation. Algorithms from my research have been deployed at several businesses, measurably impacting Alibaba, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Dream11.

Teaching & Students (I am unable to respond to most inquiries regarding openings for Ph.D. positions, as admissions are handled at the departmental level.)

Service

  • Associate Editor for journals: Operations Research, Management Science
  • Program Committee for conferences: EC 2026 (track chair), WINE 2025 (senior), EC 2025 (senior), EC 2024 (senior), WINE 2023 (senior), EC 2023, WINE 2022, EC 2022, WINE 2021, EC 2021
  • Board Member of INFORMS Revenue Management & Pricing (RMP) section
  • Conference/Workshop Organization: GenAI for Operational Decision-Making Workshop 2026, RMP 2025, DSL70, NYC Ops Day 2024, NYC Ops Day 2023, RMP cluster chair at INFORMS 2022

Book Chapters

  • Randomized Rounding Approaches to Online Allocation, Sequencing, and Matching, INFORMS Tutorials, 2024
  • Assortment Optimization: An Annotated Reading Assortment, ACM SIGecom Exchanges, 2024

Cite





Papers

All Papers (60)
Revenue Management (13) Online Matching (12) Inventory Management (8) Contention Resolution (7) Prophet Inequalities (7) Sample Complexity (6) Distributional Uncertainty (5) E-commerce Fulfillment (5) Choice and Valuation Estimation (4) Real-world Deployment (4) LLM (4) Assortment Optimization (4) Online and Stochastic Knapsack (4) Fairness (3) Mechanism Design (3) Algorithms with Predictions (2) Reusable Resources (2) Ranking (2) Bundling (2) Neural Network Verification (2)
Under Revision (4) OR (13) MS (9) MOR (5) MSOM (2) MP (2) ACM-TEAC (2) IJAA (1) ORL (1)
EC (11) NeurIPS (7) WINE (5) SODA (3) AISTATS (2) ICML (1) ITCS (1) STOC (1) IPCO (1) SOSA (1)
2026 (9) 2025 (9) 2024 (8) 2023 (8) 2022 (11) 2021 (6) 2020 (6) ≤2019 (6)