管理科学系学术讲座（11月16日）

时间：2026年11月16日（周一） 15:30-17:00

地点：管理学院思源楼524室

主题：Serving an Aging Society: Targeted or Universal Subsidies for Community Meal Centers?

主讲人：Sergei Savin 宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院教授

主持人：田林复旦大学管理学院教授

Abstract:

As populations age, ensuring seniors’ access to affordable meals of good quality has become an important public-service challenge. We study subsidy design for a privately run Community Meal Center (CMC) that may serve both senior and non-senior consumers, with seniors receiving a government-set price discount, and the center operator compensated with a per-meal subsidy.

We develop an analytical model in which the government chooses the discount and the subsidy subject to a limited budget, while a profit-maximizing CMC operator decides whether to participate in service provision and chooses its service scope, listed price, and non-contractible meal quality. We compare a targeted subsidy, paid only for senior-consumed meals, with a universal subsidy, paid for every meal served. Targeting supports a senior-only operation without directly rewarding expansion of service to non-senior consumers. Universal coverage rewards broader participation and enlarges the set of all-consumer outcomes that the government can implement. We find that neither scheme generally dominates. Targeting may yield higher welfare when both schemes induce senior-only service, and the operator's profit receives a positive welfare weight. Universal coverage weakly dominates when both schemes induce all-consumer service, whereas the ranking is ambiguous when targeting induces senior-only service and universal coverage induces all-consumer service. Most notably, when the government values only senior consumer surplus, universal coverage always weakly dominates targeting.

Our paper provides guidance on how governments should jointly design the senior discount and subsidy coverage in a multi-group CMC with non-contractible quality.

Subsidy eligibility need not coincide with the population whose welfare the government seeks to improve. Non-senior consumers can be valuable even when their surplus receives no direct welfare weight, because their participation affects the price–quality terms received by seniors and can increase senior surplus.

Bio:

Professor Savin’s research expertise is centered on operational aspects of health care delivery, improving patient access to care, and optimal management of diagnostic and treatment capacity. His articles have appeared in Management Science, Operations Research, and Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, among others, and he also actively participates in editorial activities for several premier journals including Management Science, Operations Research, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Production and Operations Management.

Professor Savin teaches a PhD course on optimization, the core MBA course on Business Analytics, and the core undergraduate course on Operations and Information Management.

Before joining the Wharton School in July 2009, Professor Savin was on the faculty at the Columbia Business School and the London Business School. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 and a Ph.D. in Operations and Information Management from the Wharton School in 2001.