题　目：Information Provision to Newsvendor: Cheap Talk and Predictive AI

嘉　宾：芦涛，副教授，康涅狄格大学

主持人：江浦平 助理教授 上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院

时　间：2025年1月10日（周五）14:00-15:30

地　点：安泰楼A503室

内容简介：

In this talk, I will present two papers related to the provision of demand information in newsvendor settings. In the first paper, we revisit a canonical setting in supply chain management: a retailer sources a product from a manufacturer that invests in capacity in advance of the retailer’s order. When the retailer possesses private demand information, it is well understood that cheap-talk communication of demand as a point forecast cannot be credible absent considerations of trust or the reactive setting of the wholesale price. We depart from the literature by allowing the retailer to communicate both the average demand and forecast accuracy. We establish that credible and informative communication emerges in equilibrium under very general conditions. Moreover, when the manufacturer has multiple sources of capacity that differ in reservation and execution costs, the communication can be influential, strictly improve the manufacturer's expected profit, and result in a Pareto-improvement of supply chain profits. The second paper is ongoing work that explores the design of predictive machines for a human decision-maker choosing an order quantity to meet uncertain demand. Demand depends on objective factors, which can be processed by a machine, and domain-specific information, which requires cognitive effort from humans to elicit. We characterize the conditions under which imperfect machine precision maximizes the expected monetary profit.

演讲人简介：

Tao Lu is an associate professor at the Department of Operations and Information Management, University of Connecticut. Prior to joining UConn, he taught at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University in the Netherlands. His research interests lie broadly in supply chain management, sustainable operations, and gig economy platforms. His work has been published (or forthcoming) in premier academic journals such as Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Operations Research, Information Systems Research, Production and Operations Management, and Transportation Science. He has received Management Science Distinguished Service Award and currently serves as an Associate Editor of Service Science.

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