R. Ravi

About

R. Ravi is the Andris A. Zoltners Professor of Business and a Professor of Operations Research and Computer Science at the Tepper School of Business. His academic role involves research and teaching in the fields of operations research, computer science, and business. His work is aligned with the strategic vision of the Tepper School, which emphasizes the intersection of business, technology, and analytics, contributing to thought leadership in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and their applications in management science and organizational behavior.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Business
• Microeconomics
• Accounting
• Advertising
• Statistics
• Finance
• Mathematics
• Internet privacy
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• The Beneficial Effects of Ad Blockers

  Management Science · 2020 · 40 citations

  Although online advertising is the lifeline of many internet content platforms, the usage of ad blockers has surged in recent years, presenting a challenge to platforms dependent on ad revenue. Using a simple analytical model with two competing platforms, we show that the presence of ad blockers can actually benefit platforms. In particular, there are conditions under which the optimal equilibrium strategy for the platforms is to allow the use of ad blockers (rather than using an ad-block wall o…

  DOI

• First-Price Auctions in Online Display Advertising

  Journal of Marketing Research · 2021 · 39 citations

  The authors link the rapid and dramatic move from second-price to first-price auction format in the display advertising market, on the one hand, to the move from the waterfalling mechanism employed by publishers for soliciting bids in a preordered cascade over exchanges to an alternate header bidding strategy that broadcasts the request for bid to all exchanges simultaneously, on the other. First, they argue that the move from waterfalling to header bidding was a revenue-improving move for publi…

  DOI

• Graph Searching with Predictions

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2020 · 18 citations

  Consider an agent exploring an unknown graph in search of some goal state. As it walks around the graph, it learns the nodes and their neighbors. The agent only knows where the goal state is when it reaches it. How do we reach this goal while moving only a small distance? This problem seems hopeless, even on trees of bounded degree, unless we give the agent some help. This setting with "help" often arises in exploring large search spaces (e.g., huge game trees) where we assume access to some sco…

  DOI

• The Nonstationary Newsvendor with (and Without) Predictions

  Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2025-03-04 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  Problem definition: The classic newsvendor model yields an optimal decision for a “newsvendor” selecting a quantity of inventory under the assumption that the demand is drawn from a known distribution. Motivated by applications such as cloud provisioning and staffing, we consider a setting in which newsvendor-type decisions must be made sequentially in the face of demand drawn from a stochastic process that is both unknown and nonstationary. All prior work on this problem either (a) assumes that…

  PublisherDOI

• Approximately Packing Dijoins via Nowhere-Zero Flows

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Approximation Algorithms for Network Optimization

  NSF · $251k · 2007–2011

• New Directions in Approximation Algorithms

  NSF · $188k · 2004–2008

• Preliminary Algorithmic Foundations for Ranking Quizzes and Students from Student-sourced Quizzes

  NSF · $148k · 2016–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Anupam Gupta

  Mercer University

  41 shared

• Viswanath Nagarajan

  Karpagam Academy of Higher Education

  34 shared

• Amitabh Sinha

  25 shared

• Philip N. Klein

  Providence College

  24 shared

• Madhav Marathe

  21 shared

• Guy E. Blelloch

  Carnegie Mellon University

  16 shared

• Russell Schwartz

  Carnegie Mellon University

  16 shared

• Mohit Singh

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  15 shared

Similar researchers at Carnegie Mellon University

• Denise Rousseauh-76
• Robert Millerh-67
• David Krackhardth-54