管科系系列讲座第226-229期预告

管科系系列讲座第226期预告

时　间：2019年4月9日（周二）13:30

地　点：史带楼301

主持人：张显东教授

主讲嘉宾：Professor Bo Chen (陈礴), Chair of Operations Research & Management Science and Co-director of DIMAP (Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications), University of Warwick, UK. 

Title：Atomic Congestion Games with Random Players

Abstract: In this talk, we will present a new model of congestion games with finite and random number of players, which is a relatively unexplored area of research on congestion games. We will provide an analytical method to compute the random path and link flows. We study the equilibrium condition, reformulate it as an equivalent variational inequality problem, and establish the existence and nonuniqueness of the equilibria. We also upper bound the price of anarchy with linear cost functions to characterize the quality of the equilibria, which is tight in some special cases, including the case of the deterministic players, and provide a general lower bound.

 管科系系列讲座第227期预告

时　间：2019年4月11日（周四）13:30

地　点：史带楼301

主持人：陈祥锋教授

主讲嘉宾：Jing WU is an assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong College of Business.

Title：The Financing Role of Inventory: Evidence from China’s Metal Industries

Abstract: Classical inventory theory examines various factors on the matching of demand and supply. In this paper, we find the model and empirical evidence for the financing role as an essential complementary factor. The- oretically, we analyze a model to show that inventory can be leveraged to obtain financial gains thus the optimal inventory level is associated with the investment opportunities. Empirically, we first show at the country-level, China’s inventory of copper, aluminum, and zinc are driven by the investment returns after controlling for other explanations, including price trajectory, currency risk, industrial demand, and economic uncertainty. Then we confirm the result at the firm-level using data from China’s manufacturing sector, and further establish the financing mechanism especially for the metal industries. The economic impact of the financing role is significant compared to the demand- or supply-side factors, suggesting that classical inventory theory should incorporate the financing role in making the optimal policy decision.

管科系系列讲座第228期预告

时　间：2019年5月14日（周二）13:30

地　点：史带楼301

主持人：冯天俊教授（商务分析与运营创新研究中心）

主讲嘉宾：Jordan Tong is the Wisconsin Naming Partners Professor at the Wisconsin School of Business, where he is an Associate Professor in the Operations and Information Management department. 

Title：Modeling Customer Response to Service Quality Variability with Implications for Pricing

Abstract: We consider a firm that sells a service repeatedly with variable but stationary quality. Customers update their beliefs about quality based on their experiences, and their probability of purchase in each period is increasing in their belief about mean quality. We show that under a fixed price, quality variability leads to a revenue penalty. With quality variability, customer beliefs not only fluctuate, but also become downwardly biased. These effects arise even when customers are risk neutral and update beliefs symmetrically for good and bad experiences. Through sensitivity analyses, we find that this revenue penalty is greatest when quality variability is large, consumers place a strong weight on recent experiences, and when the mean service quality is high. We then investigate whether the firm can improve revenues through dynamic pricing. We show that a fixed perceived surplus pricing policy—charging a lower price when a customer believes the quality is lower to induce a constant purchase probability—is not only optimal but can also achieve the same revenue as the optimal revenue under no quality variability. We then use heuristic policies and numerical examples to show that the firm can still achieve significant revenue gains through dynamic pricing even in scenarios in which one cannot perfectly estimate customer beliefs about quality. Finally, we extend our model to consider social learning and competition between two firms who both have variable quality.

管科系系列讲座第229期预告

时　间：2019年5月17日（周五）10:00

地　点：李达三楼104

主持人：殷志文副院长

主讲嘉宾：Wendy Chen is an Assistant Professor in Business Analytics, Department of Finance, School of Business, Providence College

Title：Properties of Dynamic Prices under Satiation and Habit Formation

Abstract: We study a dynamic pricing problem when consumers form the habit and/or satiation from their past consumption in this paper. Our analysis is based on the utility model under habit formation and satiation proposed and axiomatized in the decision analysis literature recently, which provides a solid behavioral foundation for our model. Based on this utility model, we derive an inter-temporal dependent demand function to capture how demand depends on prices in previous periods through habit formation and satiation. Our analysis shows that either penetration, skimming, U-shaped", or Inverse-U-shaped" policy may become optimal in a finite horizon problem. In a finite horizon problem, there always exists a steady-state price that is independent of consumers habit formation or satiation. Therefore, in the long run, market segmentation based on these psychological factors is not necessary.

管理科学系

2019-3-13