【Host】Dr. Lei Zhao

【Time】September 24, 2013, 14:00 – 16:00 （Tuesday）

【Location】Room 412, Shun-de Building

【Title 1】Bundling Strategies for Vertically Differentiated Products

【Speaker】Prof. Dorothée Honhon, Assistant professor, Jindal School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas

【Abstract】We consider a retailer selling vertically differentiated products, i.e., products with different quality levels. These products can be sold individually or as part of bundles. The retailer determines the selling price for each product and bundle offered in her assortment, in order to maximize profit under capacity constraints. Customers determine what to buy based on their valuation of quality. We characterize the optimal bundling strategy and obtain analytical expressions for the optimal prices. We also study the pure complete bundling strategy (offering only a bundle with all products) and pure component strategy (offering only individual products) and establish conditions under which these policies are optimal. Our work extends the current knowledge on product bundling by considering more than 2 products, vertically differentiation, profit maximization and capacity constraints.

【Brief bio】Dr. Dorothée Honhon received her Undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Business Administration from the University of Liege, Belgium and a Ph.D. in Operations Management from New York University. From 2006 to 2011 she worked at the McCombs School of Business of the University of Texas at Austin. From 2011 to 2013 she worked at the Eindhoven University of Technology, in the Netherlands. Since July 2013 she works as an Assistant Professor at the Jindal School of Management of the University of Texas at Dallas. Her research interests include inventory management, assortment planning, retail operations, behavioral operations management and transportation theory. She has published papers in Management Science, Operations Research, MSOM and POMs.

【Title 2】Is online shopping better for the environment?

【Speaker】Prof. Edgar E. Blanco, Research director, Center for Transportation & Logistics, MIT

【Abstract】Since the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, there has been a significant increase in online shopping in the United States. As online shopping keeps growing, so does the online retail supply chain industry. Multiple players are now investing in this industry, either through pure online retailing or by click and mortar retailing, which also has a physical presence and a face-to-face experience with their customers. While significant research has been done on the operational, marketing, branding and buying behavior dimensions of both retailing processes, there have been very limited studies on their comparative environmental impact.

This presentation will share recent analysis estimating and compare the carbon footprint of the shopping process through ten consumer buying behaviors representing different combinations of the search, purchase and return phases of the shopping process for three representative products (electronics, clothing and toys). Using Monte Carlo Simulation, multiple scenarios of supply chain configurations, consumer transportation choices, urban density, packaging and item bundling were evaluated. This work was part of the forthcoming master thesis of Mr. Dimitri Weideli's, under the supervision of Dr. Edgar Blanco.

【Brief bio】Dr. Edgar Blanco is a Research Director at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics and is the Executive Director of the MIT SCALE Network in Latin America. He has over sixteen years of experience in designing and improving logistics and supply chain systems.

Dr. Blanco is widely recognized as an expert on carbon footprint assessments of global supply chains and models of environmental impacts of freight transportation and logistics activities. His work on carbon-efficient supply chain balances theoretical and applied work, which has allowed him to establish strong working relationships within academia, as well as with industry practitioners, governments and NGOs. Dr. Blanco co-led the Leaders in Environmental Assessment and Performance (LEAP) research group at MIT.

Dr. Blanco is also the founder and director of the MIT Megacity Logistics Lab, a pioneering initiative in the field of urban logistics. His approach of integrating consumer and retail behavior in emerging markets, urban morphology, mobile phone technologies, visualization and logistics analytics, has opened a new area of research currently being applied in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Prior to joining MIT, Dr. Blanco was leading the Inventory Optimization practice at Retek (now Oracle Retail). He received his Ph.D. from the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His educational background includes a B.S. and M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and a M.S. in Operations Research from the Georgia Institute of Technology.