Yi-Chun Akchen (formerly Yi-Chun Chen)

I am an Assistant Professor at the UCL School of Management, University College London, since August 2023. I develop data-driven models and algorithms to understand customer choice and guide complex decision-making in retail and platform operations. My research draws on optimization and machine learning, with applications in assortment and inventory planning.

I received my PhD from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where I was fortunate to be advised by Professor Velibor Mišić. I received my master’s degree from Stanford University and bachelor’s degree from National Taiwan University.

CV: PDF | Email:

Working Papers:

  1. Do You Have My Size In Stock? Assortment and Inventory Optimization Under the Consider-Fit-Then-Choose Choice Model
    with Kaan Cakiroglu, Felipe Caro, and Jacob Feldman, 2026.

Refereed Journal Papers:

  1. Consider or Choose? The Role and Power of Consideration Sets
    with Dmitry Mitrofanov
    Management Science (2026)
    • Finalist, Service Science Best Cluster Paper Competition, INFORMS, 2024.
  2. On Size Substitution and Its Role in Assortment and Inventory Planning
    with Felipe Caro
    Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (2026)
  3. Assortment Optimization under the Decision Forest Model
    with Velibor Mišić
    Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (2026)
  4. Column-Randomized Linear Programs: Performance Guarantees and Applications
    with Velibor Mišić
    Operations Research (2025)
  5. Decision Forest: A Nonparametric Approach to Modeling Irrational Choice
    with Velibor Mišić
    Management Science (2022)
    • Blog post in Management Science Review
    • Honorable Mention, George Nicholson Student Paper Prize, INFORMS, 2020.
    • 1st Place, Decision Analysis Student Paper Award, INFORMS, 2019.
    • 2nd Place, Jeff McGill Revenue Management and Pricing Student Paper Award, INFORMS, 2019.
    • Finalist, Service Science Best Paper Award, INFORMS, 2019.
    • Spotlight Presentation, 2019 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Conference.
  6. Deep Reinforcement Learning for Event-Driven Multi-Agent Decision Processes
    with Kunal Menda, Justin Grana, James Bono, Brendan Tracey, Mykel Kochenderfer, and David Wolpert
    IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (2019)
  7. Learning Discrete Bayesian Networks from Continuous Data
    with Tim Wheeler and Mykel Kochenderfer
    Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (2017)

Refereed Conference Papers:

  1. Improving Offline Value-Function Approximations for POMDPs by Reducing Discount Factors
    with Mykel Kochenderfer and Matthijs Spaan
    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (2018)

Other Publications:

  1. Clustering Our Challenger Tour
    with Onesun Steve Yoo and Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP)
    ATP 2023 Sustainability Report, Page 22 (2024)