Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is Amazon’s 3rd party marketplace for e-commerce sellers. In the past decade, FBA has grown rapidly - growth that has only accelerated during the pandemic. By most measures, FBA is now larger than Amazon’s own retail business. This has created a significant challenge for capacity management since 3rd party sellers have considerable autonomy over how much inventory they send to Amazon. In this talk, we provide an overview of the FBA capacity management problem and describe an innovative market-based mechanism for capacity recently launched in North America. The mechanism uses a novel combination of securities and ex-post inspection. It admits a simple bidding strategy, implicitly scores sellers on key business outputs, and extracts minimal (often zero) incremental revenue from sellers.

Garrett van Ryzin is a Distinguished Scientist at Amazon in the Supply Chain Optimization Technologies (SCOT) group. Before joining Amazon, he was a Distinguished Scientist and Head of Marketplace Lab at Lyft, working on pricing and market design. Prior to Lyft, Garrett was Head of Marketplace Optimization Advanced Development at Uber. Garrett was also a Professor of Decision Risk and Operations at Columbia University and subsequently Professor of Operations, Technology and Information Management at Cornell Tech. Garrett received a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, and holds a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT.

A limited number of seat are open to Columbia affiliates to attend in person by registering. Online attendance is open to the public with registration.

The CAIT Distinguished Lecture Series seeks to promote education and learning on the state of artificial intelligence technology through lectures from both academic and industry researchers and experts. Lectures are held throughout the academic year and are open to the public.