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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Singapore:20260311T100000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Singapore:20260311T233000
DTSTAMP:20260408T132243
CREATED:20260227T013022Z
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SUMMARY:DAO-ISEM-IORA Seminar Series: Peng Sun
DESCRIPTION:Name of Speaker\n\nPeng Sun\n\n\n\nSchedule \n\n11 Mar 2026\, 10am – 11.30am \n(60 min talk + 30 min Q&A)\n\n\n\nVenue \n\n\nBIZ2 0511\n\n\n\nLink to register \n(via Zoom)\n\nhttps://nus-sg.zoom.us/meeting/register/8WAQ86W5TMW5MZzaiDBNiQ\n\n\n\n\nTitle\n\n\nOptimal Push\, Pull\, and Failure Funding for Global Health\n\n\n\n\nAbstract \n\n\nMalaria and tuberculosis each cause over half a million deaths annually\, yet commercial incentives to develop treatments for these and other diseases concentrated in low-income countries remain weak. Governments and nonprofits address this gap through push (e.g.\, grants) and pull (e.g.\, prizes) mechanisms. We propose a third approach: the funder pays only if the firm fails\, reimbursing part of its testing costs. This failure insurance is optimal when markets are large enough to reward success but too small to justify initial investment. We model the problem as an infinite-dimensional optimization problem with adverse selection and moral hazard constraints\, and use duality theory to characterize optimal funding mechanisms.  Failure insurance is preferred for tuberculosis if testing costs are below \$1 billion. For most tropical diseases\, including malaria\, the optimal policy is pull funding with supplemental push support. These results challenge current push-heavy practice and offer broader insights for global health and innovation policy.\n\n\n\n\nAbout the Speaker\n\n\nPeng Sun is a JB Fuqua Professor in the Decision Sciences area at the Fuqua School of Business\, Duke University. He researches mathematical theories and models for resource allocation decisions under uncertainty\, and incentive issues in dynamic environments. His work spans a range of applications areas\, from operations management\, economics\, finance\, marketing\, to health care and sustainability. He has served as a Department Editor at Management Science\, and an Associate Editor at Operations Research.
URL:https://iora.nus.edu.sg/events/dao-isem-iora-seminar-series-11-mar-2026-10am/
CATEGORIES:IORA Seminar Series
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DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Singapore:20260318T100000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Singapore:20260318T113000
DTSTAMP:20260408T132243
CREATED:20260309T081250Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260309T081250Z
UID:27566-1773828000-1773833400@iora.nus.edu.sg
SUMMARY:DAO-ISEM-IORA Seminar Series: Robert Shumsky
DESCRIPTION:Name of Speaker\n\n\nRobert Shumsky\n\n\n\n\nSchedule \n\n\n18 Mar 2026\, 10am – 11.30am \n (60 min talk + 30 min Q&A) \n\n\n\n\nVenue \n\n\nBIZ2 0511\n\n\n\n\nLink to register \n(via Zoom) \n\n\nhttps://nus-sg.zoom.us/meeting/register/fjT0SX_zQPCBsBv0ciBjsw\n\n\n\n\nTitle\n\n\nUse it or Slowly Lose it: Expertise Atrophy with Organizational AI Usage\n\n\n\n\nAbstract \n\n\nAs organizations adopt generative AI\, its use can improve productivity but reliance can lead to atrophy of worker knowledge and skills over time. The challenge is how to incentivize human oversight and maintain long-run expertise. Using a principal-agent framework\, we study optimal incentive design when workers can exert costly effort to verify and correct imperfect AI output\, where effort both improves current performance and preserves expertise. A central managerial challenge is that improving AI quality makes oversight harder to motivate\, since acceptable outcomes increasingly occur even when workers shirk. Consequently\, profit-maximizing compensation can be non-monotonic in AI quality\, skill\, or return on effort\, and organizations may even be better off\, in terms of profitability\, with worse AI systems. More subtle implications arise when skills decay with AI reliance. First\, due to contracting frictions\, we find that firms may (rationally) allow expertise to deteriorate by substituting higher effort from non-experts for expertise\, leading to significant performance losses compared to a system in which both effort and expertise can be prescribed. Second\, when tasks are relatively less complex with short learning curves and high returns on effort for low-skilled workers\, then the risk of skill atrophy can mitigate these frictions. For such tasks workers are self-motivated to preserve expertise\, so that higher rates of potential skill loss can\, counterintuitively\, increase profit. These insights highlight a managerial “danger zone” in which low-to-moderate skill decay is easily overlooked yet leads to substantial long-term losses\, underscoring when proactive investment in human expertise is most valuable.\n\n\n\n\nAbout the Speaker\n\n\nRobert Shumsky is a Professor of Operations Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and is faculty co-director of Health Care Management Education at Dartmouth. His research focuses on the improvement of service operations\, and he has written about capacity estimation and control\, how to allocate work to improve quality\, and how to coordinate service supply chains. He has conducted research on the U.S. air traffic management system and studied transportation operations for state agencies and the Federal Aviation Administration. He has also served as a consultant for both manufacturing and service operations\, including call centers and health care providers. Professor Shumsky has published articles in many academic journals including Operations Research\, Management Science\, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. He currently serves in various editorial positions for several academic journals. He received his PhD degree in Operations Research from MIT.
URL:https://iora.nus.edu.sg/events/dao-isem-iora-seminar-series-robert-shumsky/
CATEGORIES:IORA Seminar Series
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Singapore:20260320T100000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Singapore:20260320T233000
DTSTAMP:20260408T132243
CREATED:20260312T140809Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260312T140809Z
UID:27568-1774000800-1774049400@iora.nus.edu.sg
SUMMARY:DAO-ISEM-IORA Seminar Series: Ignacio Rios
DESCRIPTION:Name of Speaker\n\n\nIgnacio Rios\n\n\n\n\nSchedule \n\n\n20 Mar 2026\, 10am – 11.30am \n (60 min talk + 30 min Q&A)\n\n\n\nVenue \n\n\nBIZ1 0302\n\n\n\nLink to register \n(via Zoom)\n\nhttps://nus-sg.zoom.us/meeting/register/-QjsYdlrQXyy-bdAfa6zlg\n\n\n\n\nTitle\n\n\nDesigning Effective Fundraising Campaigns: The Role of Incentives and Solicitation Mechanisms\n\n\n\n\nAbstract \n\n\nCharitable donations are a vital source of funding for nonprofit organizations\, enabling them to carry out their mission of addressing social issues and providing support to those in need. To boost contributions\, third parties often donate large sums that fundraisers use to incentivize individual donations\, with one-to-one matching being the most common mechanism. However\, alternative designs may lead to even higher contributions. This paper investigates the effectiveness of two design choices in the context of fundraising: (i) the incentive mechanism\, focusing on the two most prevalent ones (i.e.\, matching and gift unlock); and (ii) the solicitation mechanism\, i.e.\, whether donations occur simultaneously or sequentially. We introduce a stylized game-theoretical model where a fundraiser decides the design choices and corresponding design parameters to maximize overall donations. Following the fundraiser’s decision\, donors make their one-time contribution. For each design choice\, we characterize the equilibrium donations and find the fundraiser’s optimal policy. We find that gift unlock consistently outperforms matching. Moreover\, sequential solicitation is the optimal choice with gift unlock\, whereas simultaneous solicitation yields higher overall contributions with matching. Furthermore\, our simulations indicate that the effectiveness of gift unlock is robust to peer effects and donor participation uncertainty. Our findings indicate that fundraisers should prioritize gift unlock over matching\, align the selected incentive mechanism with the optimal solicitation format\, and calibrate campaign parameters to maximize donation outcomes.\n\n\n\n\nAbout the Speaker\n\n\nIgnacio Ríos is an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at the Jindal School of Management\, University of Texas at Dallas. He holds a Ph.D. in Operations\, Information\, and Technology and an M.A. in Economics from Stanford University\, as well as degrees in Operations Management and Industrial Engineering from the University of Chile. His research expertise lies in behavioral market design\, with a focus on how incentives\, information\, allocation rules and users’ behavior shape outcomes in markets without money. Ignacio has played a leading role in the reform of Chile’s school choice and college admissions systems\, and also in designing other two-sided matching markets. His work has been recognized with numerous awards\, including the Poets & Quants “40 Under 40 Best Business School Professors” distinction\, the IFORS Prize for OR in Development\, and the BOM Best Paper Award.
URL:https://iora.nus.edu.sg/events/dao-isem-iora-seminar-series-ignacio-rios/
CATEGORIES:IORA Seminar Series
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Singapore:20260327T100000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Singapore:20260327T113000
DTSTAMP:20260408T132243
CREATED:20260325T031142Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260325T031142Z
UID:27572-1774605600-1774611000@iora.nus.edu.sg
SUMMARY:DAO-ISEM-IORA Seminar Series: Yael Grushka-Cockayne
DESCRIPTION:Name of Speaker\n\n\nYael Grushka-Cockayne \n\n\n\n\nSchedule \n\n\n27 Mar 2026\, 10am – 11.30am \n (60 min talk + 30 min Q&A)\n\n\n\nVenue \n\n\nHSS 4-2\n\n\n\nLink to register \n(via Zoom)\n\nhttps://nus-sg.zoom.us/meeting/register/51hGI1hiRe-T473GjiQA1w\n\n\n\n\nTitle\n\n\nDecision-making with Ordinal Ratings\n\n\n\n\nAbstract \n\n\nExperts often provide judgments on an ordinal scale\, which are easy to generate and are intuitive. Ordinal ratings\, however\, are not trivial to aggregate across multiple experts\, as they provide neither the strict preference ordering of a ranking\, nor the intensity of preference of cardinal scores. In addition\, ordinal rating judgments often map to a broad set of outcomes\, which are not expressed through the ordinal\, discrete set of choices elicited. In this way\, ordinal ratings also neglect to express the degree of uncertainty that may exist when rankings are interpreted as forecasts. We offer a framework for mapping ordinal ratings to continuous outcome distributions\, allowing for the aggregation of ratings and the expression of the uncertainty that may exist in the forecasts. Finally\, our framework allows for rendering the aggregate distributional forecasts back to the original ordinal scale\, providing again an intuitive set of judgements\, to be used by the decision maker. We demonstrate our framework in the context of National Football League (NFL) scout assessments of players performance. These assessments\, treated as forecasts\, are utilized by general managers when making player selection decisions in the annual NFL draft.\n\n\n\n\nAbout the Speaker\n\n\nYael Grushka-Cockayne \nLandmark Communication Incorporated Professor of Business Administration\, Vice Dean and Senior Associate Dean for Professional Degree Programs\, Academic Co-Director of the LaCross Institute for AI.\nProfessor Yael Grushka-Cockayne’s research and teaching activities focus on data science\, artificial intelligence\, forecasting\, project management and behavioral decision-making. Her research is published in numerous academic and professional journals\, and she is a regular speaker at international conferences in the areas of decision analysis\, project management and management science. Prof. Grushka-Cockayne is an award-winning teacher\, winning the Darden Morton Leadership Faculty Award in 2011\, the University of Virginia’s Mead-Colley Award in 2012\, the Darden Outstanding Faculty Award in 2013 and 2022\, University of Virginia All University Teaching Award in 2015\, the Faculty Diversity Award in 2013 and 2018\, and the Transformational Faculty Award in 2024. Prof. Grushka-Cockayne teaches the core “Decision Analysis” course\, an elective she designed on project management\, an elective on data science and a new course on coding with ChatGPT. \nBefore starting her academic career\, she worked in San Francisco as a marketing director of an Israeli ERP company. As an expert in the areas of project management\, Prof. Grushka-Cockayne has served as a consultant to international firms in the aerospace and pharma industries. She is a UVA Excellence in Diversity fellow and a member of INFORMS\, the President of the Decision Analysis Society\, and a member of the Operational Research Society and the Project Management Institute (PMI). She served an associate editor at Management Science and is currently as associate editor at Operation Research. \nGrushka-Cockayne was named one of “21 Thought-Leader Professors” in Data Science. Her course “Fundamentals of Project Planning and Management” Coursera MOOC has over 300\,000 enrolled\, across 200 countries worldwide. Her “Data Science for Business” Harvard Online course\, launched in 2021\, has taught hundreds of learners around the world.
URL:https://iora.nus.edu.sg/events/dao-isem-iora-seminar-series-yael-grushka-cockayne/
CATEGORIES:IORA Seminar Series
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