Promoting DEI via Operational Interventions

Job market paper. Joint work with Kamalini Ramdas and Monika Heller.
Under review at Operations Research, available upon request.
We manipulate prior teaching ratings and instructor gender (via name, photo, and voice) under identical teaching quality in the experiments.
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Joint work with Kamalini Ramdas and Monika Heller.
We collaborated with a leading e-learning platform and obtained an anonymized dataset of over 78,000 observations. We find that female trainers are rated significantly lower in courses such as Cloud Computing and Cyber Security, where female trainers are less representative.
We also collaborate with Coursera and the Learning Innovation Team at London Business School. We are privileged to have an agreement in principle to implement a field experiment on Coursera under its A/B testing environment. The experiment is under design.

Joint work with Kamalini Ramdas and Monika Heller.
We examine how different ratings display formats can reduce prior ratings bias while still providing service clients with sufficient and useful information. We also aim to mitigate gender or racial biases by refining information disclosure designs on prior ratings.
Experiments in progress.

Improving Public Services via Emerging Technologies

Ph.D. candidacy paper. Joint work with Kamalini Ramdas and S. Alex Yang.
We examine how group testing can improve diagnostic testing. Group testing involves pooling and testing samples collectively, reducing the number of tests needed while maintaining accuracy. On the other hand, the effectiveness of group testing depends on the risk levels of individuals within the same group, which is private information. Our game theoretic analysis shows that assigning individuals with identical risk levels to the same group (i.e., assortative batching) minimizes test costs and maximizes social welfare. In addition, we propose a screening contract to reveal private risk levels by self-selection, demonstrating how health administrators can improve testing strategies through operational design. We conduct online surveys embedded with the design for empirical validation.
We plan to refine the model considering bounded rationality to align theoretical results and experimental evidence.

Joint work with S. Alex Yang and Chaoran Liu.
We empirically analyze the effects of Gen AI on digital marketing in the restaurant industry. While Gen AI enables small restaurant owners to produce marketing content efficiently in social media, we hypothesize that it also leads to homogenization, reducing distinctiveness in brand promotion.
Analysis in progress.

Joint work with Kamalini Ramdas and Monika Heller.
In education settings, concerns have been raised that Gen AI can hinder learning as students may use it as a "crutch." We investigate how instruction styles of AI-based chatbots influence students’ engagement and learning outcomes.
The field experiment has received ethics approval.

Master Thesis. Joint work with Jian Chen.
Air catering companies face challenges in managing unpredictable meal demands, as they must fulfill last-minute orders based on passenger counts with little time for emergency restocking. Prediction models are useful but cannot fully address the cost balancing between wasted meals and urgent restocking. We propose to set up an on-site warehouse at the airport that can quickly restock planes as needed. This warehouse would receive regular shipments from the factory, enabling faster response times and better inventory management. We analyze the multi-period inventory policy under this design and verify it with real-world data from Beijing Air Catering Co., Ltd.

Joint work with Xiaofang Wang and Guoming Lai.
For the products that provide not only intrinsic value from their functions but also stylish consumption experience, there often exist both Veblen and network effects. Some customers are more likely to purchase the product if fewer customers can afford it, while others might appreciate the existence of more peers. We study the market equilibrium under rational expectations to investigate the appropriate strategies for these products. The optimal pricing and quantity decisions reveal interesting insights about the effects of such mixed consumption externalities.
Published in Operations Research Letters, 2017, Vol. 45, Issue 61 .