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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

Will's picture 

Research

I work on the theory of online algorithms and decision-making under uncertainty. I develop data-driven methods for problems in operations and revenue management, including inventory, e-commerce fulfillment, assortment optimization, and online resource allocation. I have partnered with businesses including Alibaba, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Dream11 to deploy algorithms from my research. I am interested in improving business decisions through LLMs and AI, and part of the research team at percepta.ai.

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 Organization: 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 (59)
Online Matching (12) Revenue Management (11) Inventory Management (8) Contention Resolution (7) Prophet Inequalities (7) Distributional Uncertainty (5) E-commerce Fulfillment (5) Real-world Deployment (4) Assortment Optimization (4) Sample Complexity (4) Online and Stochastic Knapsack (4) Choice and Valuation Estimation (3) LLM (3) Fairness (3) Mechanism Design (3) Algorithms with Predictions (2) Reusable Resources (2) Ranking (2) Bundling (2) Neural Network Verification (2)
Under Revision (6) OR (13) MS (8) MOR (5) MP (2) ACM-TEAC (2) MSOM (1) ORL (1)
EC (8) NeurIPS (7) WINE (5) SODA (3) AISTATS (2) ITCS (1) STOC (1) IPCO (1) SOSA (1)
2026 (2) 2025 (9) 2024 (8) 2023 (8) 2022 (11) 2021 (6) 2020 (6) ≤2019 (6)