报告人：Yanchong (Karen) Zheng教授（美国麻省理工学院）

　　时间：2020年11月24日 上午10:30-12:00

　　会议号：腾讯会议232 310 946

　　内容摘要：

　　In order to improve the welfare of smallholder farmers, multiple countries (e.g., Ethiopia and India) have launched digital agricultural platforms to transform traditional markets. However, there is still mixed evidence regarding the impact of these platforms and more generally how they can be leveraged to enable more efficient agricultural supply chains and markets. In this talk, we describe a body of work that provides the first rigorous impact analysis of such a platform and highlights several important supply chain and logistics parameters that can inform its design and optimization. The work is focused on the Unified Market Platform (UMP) that connects all the agriculture markets in the state of Karnataka, India. Leveraging both public data and detailed bidding data from the platform, a difference-in-differences analysis demonstrates that the launch of the UMP has significantly increased the modal prices of certain commodities (2.6%-6.5%), while prices for other commodities have not changed. Furthermore, the analysis provides evidence that logistical challenges, bidding efficiency, market concentration, and price discovery processes are important factors explaining the variable impact of UMP on prices. These insights led to the design and field implementation of a new two-stage auction mechanism. This talk is based on joint work with Retsef Levi (MIT), Somya Singhvi (MIT/USC), Manoj Rajan (ReMS) and the ReMS field team in Karnataka, India.　

　　报告人简介：

　　Yanchong (Karen) Zheng is a Sloan School Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Karen's research studies fundamental and emerging operations management problems with a critical lens on the behavioral factors impacting human decisions, particularly in information-critical environments. She works on a diverse range of areas including supply chain information sharing, environmentally and socially responsible supply chains, smallholder agriculture operations, as well as consumer behavior in pricing and revenue management. Her research integrates theoretical modeling of OM problems with empirical investigation of human behavior. Karen has won several paper awards from the INFORMS society, including the 2014 Management Science Best Paper Award in Operations Management. She has received the NSF CAREER Award to support her research on trust and information transparency in operations. Karen holds undergraduate and master’s degrees from Tsinghua University in China and a PhD in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.

　　（承办：技术经济及战略管理系、科研与学术交流中心）