Daniel Freund
Daniel Freund
Biography
Daniel Freund is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at MIT Sloan.
His research applies techniques from optimization, stochastic modeling, and revenue management to problems in transportation, online platforms, and humanitarian immigration among others. His work has been widely recognized by INFORMS societies, including through the Service Science Responsible Research Paper Award (2024), the PSOR Best Paper Award (2nd place, 2024), the MSOM Best OM Paper in OR Award (2023), the Applied Probability Society Best Publication Award (2021), the George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award (2018), and the Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research and Analytics (2018). Daniel is an AE for Operations Research, Mathematics of Operations Research, and Transportation Science.
Daniel holds a BSc in mathematics from the University of Warwick (UK), as well as an MS and a PhD in applied mathematics from Cornell University, where he was advised by David B. Shmoys. Before joining MIT, Daniel was a postdoc in Lyft's Marketplace Labs team.
(You may also be looking for my name-fellow and colleague, Robert M. Freund's personal website.)
Featured Research
"On the Supply of Autonomous Vehicles in Platforms."
Freund, Daniel, Ilan Lobel, and Jiayu (Kamessi) Zhao. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management Vol. 28, No. 2 (2025): 496-516. Supplemental Material. SSRN Version.
"The Dedicated Docket in U.S. Immigration Courts: An Analysis of Fairness and Efficiency Properties."
Daniel Freund and Wentao Weng. Forthcoming in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, SSRN Version.
"Pricing and Optimization in Shared Vehicle Systems: An Approximation Framework."
Banerjee, Siddhartha, Daniel Freund, and Thodoris Lykouris. Operations Research Vol. 70, No. 3 (2022): 1783-1805. ArXiv Version.
"Regulating Wait-Driven Requests in Queues."
Freund, Daniel, David Hausman, and Wentao Weng, Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'25)
Areas of Interest
- Analytics
- Combinatorial Optimization
- Management Science
- Operations Management
- Sharing Economy
Media Highlights
Surge in Wendy’s complaints exposes limits to consumer tolerance of unstable prices
The limit to where, when and for what U.S. consumers will trade more cash for convenience.
Bike-sharing system wins 2018 Wagner Prize
A team from Cornell University and Motivate was awarded the 2018 Wagner Prize for its unique application of analytics and O.R. to improve the placement of bike docking stations and create an inventive approach to replenish and rebalance docking stations.
Citi Bike breaks the cycle of empty stations
“Bike sharing is an amazing piece of moving cities to a more sustainable foundation. Cities are being congested by cars and other fossil fuel-driven vehicular traffic, and more extensive use of bikes as a means of personal transport is a great step forward.” - David Shmoys