Contact Shandra Bremer at [email protected] with any questions.

February 21

Dorothee HonHon, Naveen Jindal School of Management

Title: It’s still good! Expiration dates & food waste

Time: 11 a.m. - noon
Location: R1240

Abstract: We examine a retailer that produces and sells a perishable product, facing three key decisions: the date label (i.e., effective shelf life) to print on the packaging, the frequency of batch production, and the quantity to produce in each batch. In making these choices, the retailer takes into account the product’s biological shelf life, the associated costs and revenues, and consumers’ attitudes and expectations regarding shelf life. We model different types of consumers based on their attitudes towards date labels and analyze how these variations affect the retailer’s optimal decisions and resulting product waste. Our findings show that when consumers rely on date labels to guide their purchases, retailers are incentivized to set shorter date labels than the actual biological shelf life. This, in turn, leads to increased food waste, as consumers discard products that are still safe to consume.

February 28

Ilan Lobel, NYU Stern

Title: Auction Design using Value Prediction with Hallucinations

Time: 11 a.m. - noon
Location: R1240

Abstract: We investigate a Bayesian mechanism design problem where a seller seeks to maximize revenue by selling an indivisible good to one of n buyers, incorporating potentially unreliable predictions (signals) of buyers’ private values derived from a machine learning model. We propose a framework where these signals are sometimes reflective of buyers’ true valuations but other times are
hallucinations, which are uncorrelated with the buyers’ true valuations. Our main contribution is a characterization of the optimal auction under this framework. Our characterization establishes a near-
decomposition of how to treat types above and below the signal. For the one buyer case, the seller’s optimal strategy is to post one of three fairly intuitive prices depending on the signal, which we call the “ignore”, “follow” and “cap” actions.

MARCH 14

Rouba Ibrahim, University College London

Title: Communication in Service Operations

Time: 11 a.m. - noon
Location: R1240

Abstract: We study the effectiveness of information design as a managerial lever to mitigate the overuse of critical resources in congestion-prone service systems. Leveraging the service provider’s informational advantage about relevant aspects of the system, effective communication requires the sharing of carefully curated information to persuade some customers to forgo service for the benefit of customers with higher service needs. To study whether effective communication can arise in equilibrium, we design controlled laboratory experiments to test the predictions of a queueing-game theoretic model that endogenizes the implementation of information-sharing policies. Our main result is that communication increases social welfare even when the service provider lacks the ability to formally commit to their information policy (as usually is the case in practical settings), i.e., under conditions where standard theory predicts that communication fails because it lacks credibility and thus fails to affect customer behaviour. (Joint work with Arturo Estrada Rodriguez and Mirko Kremer.)

MARCH 21

Julie Simmons Ivy, University of Michigan

Time: 11 a.m. - noon
Location: R1240

MARCH 28

Will Ma, Columbia University

Title: Randomized Rounding for E-commerce Fulfillment

Time: 11 a.m. - noon
Location: R1240

April 4

L. Beril Toktay, Georgia Tech: Scheller College of Business

Time: 11 a.m. - noon
Location: R1240

April 11

Peng Sun, Duke: Fuqua School of Business

Time: 11 a.m. - noon
Location: R1240

April 25

Mahesh Nagarajan, UBC Sauder School of Business

Title: Operational data driven interventions to decrease adverse events associated with Opioid overdose

Time: 11 a.m. - noon
Location: R1240

Abstract: Adverse events including deaths from illicit drug overdose (specifically Opioids) is a significant issue in North America, especially in the west coast of Canada. In this talk, we present three
systematic data driven approaches to decrease such events. First, prevention of drug use and habit formation. Second management of addiction among drug users and third, a reactive and dynamic response to forecasted overdose incidents that uses a predictive model built using near miss events and other variables as signals along with a novel caregiver scheduling mechanism. Theoretical instances of the scheduling problem presents interesting technical challenges on hardness and approximability which we will partially resolve in this talk. We discuss the implementation of these approaches in urban centres in Canada.