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DTSTART:20220101T000000
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DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Singapore:20231120T100000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Singapore:20231120T113000
DTSTAMP:20260418T052701
CREATED:20231114T041749Z
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SUMMARY:DAO-IORA Seminar Series - Zhou Zhengyuan
DESCRIPTION:  \n\n\n\nName of Speaker\nZhengyuan Zhou\n\n\nSchedule\n20 November 2023\, 10am – 11.30am\n\n\nVenue  \nBIZ1 – 0302\n\n\nLink to Register \nhttps://nus-sg.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIudu6qrTorE90DBkeYzCo1WC_rQEUdCldn\n\n\nTitle \nOptimal No-Regret Learning in Repeated First-Price Auctions\n\n\nAbstract\nFirst-price auctions have very recently swept the online advertising industry\, replacing second-price auctions as the predominant auction mechanism on many platforms for display ads bidding. This shift has brought forth important challenges for a bidder: how should one bid in a first-price auction\, where unlike in second-price auctions\, it is no longer optimal to bid one’s private value truthfully and hard to know the others’ bidding behaviors? In this paper\, we take an online learning angle and address the fundamental problem of learning to bid in repeated first-price auctions. We discuss our recent work in leveraging the special structures of the first-price auctions to design minimax optimal no-regret bidding algorithms.\n\n\nAbout the Speaker\nZhengyuan Zhou is currently an assistant professor in New York University Stern School of Business\, Department of Technology\, Operations and Statistics. Before joining NYU Stern\, Professor Zhou spent the year 2019-2020 as a Goldstine research fellow at IBM research. He received his BA in Mathematics and BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences\, both from UC Berkeley\, and subsequently a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2019. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning\, stochastic optimization and game theory and focus on leveraging tools from those fields to develop methodological frameworks to solve data-driven decision-making problems.\n\n\n\n  \n 
URL:https://iora.nus.edu.sg/events/dao-iora-seminar-series-zhou-zhengyuan/
CATEGORIES:IORA Seminar Series
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DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Singapore:20231128T100000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Singapore:20231128T113000
DTSTAMP:20260418T052701
CREATED:20231119T141330Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231119T141425Z
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SUMMARY:DAO-IORA Seminar Series- Karen Zheng
DESCRIPTION:Name of Speaker\nYanchong (Karen) Zheng\n\n\nSchedule\n28 November 2023\, 10am – 11.30am\n\n\nVenue \nI4-01-03 (Innovation 4.0\, level 1\, Seminar Room)\n\n\nLink to Register\nhttps://nus-sg.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0vf-GpqzwvHN1xiFo9IOFYhdZZS-yp1RcZ\n\n\nTitle\nImproving Farmers’ Welfare via Digital Agricultural Platforms\n\n\nAbstract\nIn 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 demonstrates how innovative price discovery mechanisms could be enabled by digital agri-platforms in resource-constrained environments. The work is focused on the Unified Market Platform (UMP) that connects all the agricultural wholesale markets in the state of Karnataka\, India. Our impact assessment shows 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. The analysis highlights operational and market factors that contribute to the variable impact of UMP on prices. Motivated by these insights\, we collaborate closely with the Karnataka government to design\, implement\, and assess the impact of a new two-stage auction on the UMP.  To ensure implementability and protect farmers’ revenue\, the design process is guided by practical operational considerations as well as semi-structured interviews with a majority of the traders in the field. A new behavioral auction model informed by the field insights is developed to determine when the proposed two-stage auction can generate a higher revenue for farmers than the traditional single-stage\, first-price\, sealed-bid auction. The new auction mechanism was implemented on the UMP for a major market of lentils in February 2019. By March 2020\, commodities worth more than $19 million (USD) had been traded under the new auction. A difference-in-differences analysis demonstrates that the implementation has yielded a significant 3.6% price increase  (corresponding to a 55%-94% profit gain)\, benefiting over 20\,000 farmers who traded in the treatment market. \nThis talk is based on joint work with Retsef Levi (MIT)\, Somya Singhvi (USC)\, Manoj Rajan (ReMS) and his team in Karnataka\, India. \nPapers: The talk will cover the following two papers with a focus on the second one: \nThe impact of unifying agricultural wholesale markets on prices and farmers’ profitability\, with Levi\, Rajan\, Singhvi. PNAS\, February 4\, 2020\, 117(5) 2366-2371. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1906854117 \nImproving Farmers’ Income on Online Agri-platforms: Evidence from the Field\, with Levi\, Rajan\, Singhvi. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3486623\n\n\nAbout the Speaker\nYanchong (Karen) Zheng is the George M. Bunker Professor and an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her recent research focuses on two general topics: (I) the design of incentives\, technologies\, and behavioral interventions to enhance efficiency\, welfare\, and sustainability in food and agriculture systems\, with a focus on smallholder supply chains; and (II) the role of information transparency in driving environmentally and socially responsible behaviors. In her research\, Zheng employs a behavior-centric\, data-driven\, field-based approach\, and she collaborates with both public and private partners on the ground to create positive impacts to society.\n\n\n\n 
URL:https://iora.nus.edu.sg/events/dao-iora-seminar-series-karen-zheng/
CATEGORIES:IORA Seminar Series
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