Prof. Ming HU
Distinguished Professor of Business Operations and Analytics,
University of Toronto
Date: 11 June, Tuesday
Time: 10:30 – 12:00
Venue: E22-G008
Host: Prof. Grace FU, Associate Professor in Business Intelligence and Analytics
Abstract
First, we study blind boxes as a novel selling mechanism in which buyers purchase sealed packages containing unknown items, with the chance of uncovering rare or special items. We show how such product randomization introduced by the blind box can improve the seller’s profitability over traditional separate selling. Second, we study how an e-commerce platform should assign sequentially arriving customers to sellers who compete to sell identical products on the platform. The allocation rule may be random and dependent on the sellers’ inventory levels. We show how such demand fulfillment randomization can incentivize sellers to hold more inventory and improve the platform’s profitability and customer welfare. Third, we study randomized promotions in which the firm randomly offers discounts over time to sequentially arriving customers with heterogeneous valuations and patience levels. We show how price randomization can improve the firm’s profitability beyond deterministic pricing policies.
Speaker
Ming Hu is University of Toronto Distinguished Professor of Business Operations and Analytics. He is a Professor of Operations Management at Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and one of the 2018 Poets & Quants Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors. His research has been featured in media such as Financial Times. Most recently, he focuses on operations management in the context of sharing economy, social buying, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and two-sided markets, with the goal to exploit operational decisions to the benefit of the society. He is the recipient of Wickham Skinner Early-Career Research Accomplishments Award by POM Society (2016) and Best Operations Management Paper in Management Science Award by INFORMS (2017). He currently serves as the editor-in-chief of Naval Research Logistics, co-editor of a special issue of Manufacturing & Service Operations Management on sharing economy and innovative marketplaces, and associate editor of Management Science, Operations Research and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and senior editor of Production and Operations Management. He received a master’s degree in Applied Mathematics from Brown University in 2003, and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Columbia University in 2009.
