TIME/DATE：2025.5.9   10：00

CLASSROOM: A402

ABSTRACT

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly its growing cognitive prowess, has presented humanity with a profound and unsettling question: What does it truly mean to be human? We contend that two essential qualities continue to define our human identity—our capacity to feel (affect) and our ability to create (creativity). These two dimensions are not only foundational but also deeply intertwined. While creativity (and innovation) is often understood as a cognitive process—where we “create by thinking”—this view overlooks its equally vital emotional dimension. Based on an integration of research spanning over multiple disciplines, we argue that creativity is also a profoundly affective experience: we “create by feeling.”

GUEST BIO

胡肖然，伦敦商学院（LBS）博士，现任教于英国伦敦政治经济学院（LSE）管理学部，担任管理学助理教授。他主要从事创新管理，领导力，文化差异和情绪情感的学术研究，主要研究成果发表于Academy of Management Journal，Organization Science等国际学术期刊。他曾获得伦敦政治经济学院表彰教职员在学术研究，教学以及行政服务等领域突出贡献的教职员贡献奖以及伦敦政经学院教育卓越奖，并多年蝉联学部十佳教师。

TIME/DATE：2025.5.19   10：00

CLASSROOM: A510

DESCRIPTION

Does ratings inflation help or hurt consumers? Managers? To answer these questions, we build a dynamic pricing model, wherein consumers’ utility depends on product features including the consumer rating that evolves over time. Applying control theory, we compare the pricing strategies with and without ratings inflation. In addition, we empirically validate the model using market data on 10,263 Airbnb properties over four years from Austin, Texas. We find a counter-intuitive result that ratings inflation helps both managers and consumers. Under the dynamic pricing context, ratings inflation helps managers because they earn a higher long-term profit although consumer surplus decreases. However, the ratio of consumer surplus in dynamic pricing relative to that from static pricing increases as ratings increase. Furthermore, the price premium over the static pricing decreases as ratings increase. Consequently, consumers are least worse off when the rating approaches its ceiling value. Hence, ratings inflation helps consumers as well.

GUEST BIO

Dr. Xiaoyi Sylvia Gao is a lecturer in Marketing at the University of Auckland Business School. She serves as a PhD co-advisor in the Department of Marketing and is the Chair of the Early Career Researcher Committee at the UoA Business School. Additionally, she is a member of the Centre of Digital Enterprise (CODE) at the same institution.

Dr. Gao earned her PhD in Management, specializing in Marketing and Information Systems, from the University of California, Irvine, in the United States. Her research interests focus on several key areas, including competition in online marketplaces, pricing and product strategies for digital goods and services, compensation schemes in the sharing economy, and online consumer product search behavior. Her methodological approaches encompass Analytical Modeling, Econometrics, and Experimental Design.

TIME/DATE：2025.4.22   12:00-13:00

CLASSROOM：A505

TENCENT：385833292

PW：805943

LINK：https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/F3wgr5Aga7NT

ABSTRACT

We examine risk-taking behaviors among investors who experienced paper gains during China’s 2007-08 bubble-crash episode, deemed as investors “escaping from death.” Using investor account data from a national brokerage in China, we find that investors who “escaped from death” reduce risk-taking behaviors over the next five years. We exploit plausibly unexpected shocks to investors’ performance during the bubble crash to address the endogeneity inherent in baseline effects analysis. The evidence shows that the change in risk taking is likely attributable to the reference-dependent preferences. However, the effect diminishes over time and investors “escaping from death” do not exhibit a diminished tendency toward risk-taking when confronted with a stock market bubble crash again.

GUEST BIO

张叶青，现任中央财经大学财经研究院副教授、金融研究室主任，中国资产管理研究中心研究员。清华大学经济管理学院金融学博士，密歇根大学（安娜堡分校）罗斯商学院访问学者。主要研究方向包括技术革新与公司金融、机器学习与大数据、劳动经济学与金融等。在Journal of Financial Markets、Economic Development and Cultural Change、《经济研究》、《管理科学学报》、《金融研究》等高水平学术期刊发表多篇论文，主持国家自然科学基金1项，博士后科学基金2项。

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering，

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

TIME/DATE: 2025.4.22  10:30

CLASSROOM: A308

ABSTRACT: 

The rapid advancement of the low-altitude economy (LAE) and urban air mobility (UAM) is reshaping urban development, logistics, and transportation systems. This presentation examines the opportunities, challenges, and policy frameworks driving the future of LAE, integrating cutting-edge research with practical applications.

First, I will introduce the LAE concept, emphasizing its vast potential in global markets, with a special focus on developments in Mainland China and Hong Kong. The discussion will outline key UAM principles and analyze the technical challenges that must be addressed to enable scalable LAE expansion.

Next, I will present our research contributions, including the design and optimization of UAV services for urban inspection, monitoring, and delivery. These case studies demonstrate how UAV technology can enhance operational efficiency and support smart city initiatives.

Finally, I will share insights from the Strategic Public Policy Research Funding (SPPRF) Project, which explores development strategies for an advanced air mobility (AAM) network in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area. While interest in AAM is growing, a cohesive policy framework for the region remains underdeveloped. Our research addresses this critical gap by systematically evaluating existing approaches and introducing survey-based insights combined with simulation-driven strategies to establish a robust methodology for accelerating AAM development.

By bridging research, industry applications, and policy development, this presentation offers actionable insights for stakeholders navigating the evolving LAE landscape.

GUEST BIO:

Prof. Hai Yang is a Chair Professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he is recognized as a leading expert in transportation research. His work has been published in top-tier international journals, including Transportation Research, Transportation Science, and Operations Research, earning him a high ranking in both publications and citations within the transportation field. Throughout his career, Prof. Yang has received numerous prestigious awards, such as the 2020 Frank M. Masters Transportation Engineering Award and the 2021 Francis C. Turner Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers. In addition, he was honored with the National Natural Science Award by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China in 2011. Prof. Yang was appointed as a Chang Jiang Chair Professor by the Ministry of Education of China and served as the Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Research (TR) Part B: Methodological from 2013 to 2018, a highly regarded journal in transportation studies. Currently, he is a member of the Distinguished Editorial Board for TR Part B and the Scientific Council for TR Part C: Emerging Technologies, and he also serves as an Advisory Editor for Transportation Science.

TIME/DATE：2025.4.15   12:00-13:00

CLASSROOM：A505

TENCENT：996513085

PW：965511

LINK：https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/MtRjV9ugHXmh

ABSTRACT：

China and countries along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) route increasingly undertake cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and integrating into global value chains (GVCs). While extant research investigates the relationship between cross-border M&As and GVC position, the conclusions remain elusive. Using industry-level panel data covering 38 BRI countries, we demonstrate that cross-border M&As contribute to GVC upgrading, with international knowledge flow playing a positive role. We further show that the positive impact of cross-border M&As on GVC position is stronger in low-tech industries, low R&D strength, financially-developing and low digitalization countries. Moreover, the positive impact is augmented by BRI cooperation. Our research highlights the significance of participating in international investment and acquiring knowledge for BRI countries.

GUEST BIO：

葛璐澜，上海财经大学经济学博士，多伦多大学访问学者，上海立信会计金融学院讲师。主要研究方向：国际金融，企业投资动态，全球价值链等。在《The World Economy》《南开经济研究》《世界经济研究》等SSCI、CSSCI期刊发表数篇学术论文。主持或参与国家社科基金重点项目、上海高校青年教师培养资助计划、校教学改革实践项目等多项课题。

TIME/DATE：2025.4.3    12:00-13:00

CLASSROOM：A505

TENCENT：328689483

PW：483467

LINK：https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/QnEauHXH2ajW

ABSTRACT：

This paper empirically investigates how an industry’s systematic risk exposure and stock returns are affected by the market concentration of its upstream and downstream industries. In the cross-section of U.S. industries, we find that industries’ cash flows and stock returns are more negatively exposed to fluctuations in the aggregate discount rate if their upstream or downstream industries are more concentrated. These industries also have higher expected stock returns and costs of capital. Our paper highlights the role of vertical competition in determining firms’ systematic risk and expected returns.

GUEST BIO：

Professor John Wei is currently Distinguished Research Professor of Financial Economics at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). He received his PhD in Finance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He previously taught at University of Mississippi, University of Miami, and Indiana University. Before joining PolyU, he served as Chair Professor of Finance at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and had worked there for 24 years. He previously served as Director of Value Partners Center for Investing and Director of the Center for Asian Financial Markets and Director of Master of Science (Financial Analysis)/(Investment Management) Programs at the HKUST for many years. He served as Acting Head in the Department of Finance at HKUST during the period of January 2000-August 2002, February-June 2003, and June 2015. Moreover, he assisted to develop wealth management and investment models for, among others, Hang Seng Bank Limited, HSBC Corporation Limited, and Fidelity Investments Management (Hong Kong) Limited.

Professor Wei’s research interests are mainly in the areas of empirical asset pricing, international finance, and corporate governance. He has published more than sixty articles in leading finance and accounting journals, including Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, The Accounting Review, Management Science, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Journal of Business, among others.

Professor Wei is best known for his extensive research on the cross-section of stock returns in the U.S. and international markets. He has discovered some new and important anomalies associated with cross-sectional return predictability and have first introduced “individualism” to the empirical asset pricing literature. Four of these papers have been cited by 2013 Economic Nobel Prize Laureate, Eugene Fama, and his co-author, Kenneth French. Most of his papers are well cited. Many of his papers are associated with the foundation of those factors in the Fama and French (2015) five- factor model and the Hou, Xue, and Zhang (2015) q-factor model.

He has received more than 8.1 million HK dollars (= 1.04 million US dollars) grant from Hong Kong SAR’s Research Grants Council as principal investigator.

TIME/DATE：2025.4.22  10:00

CLASSROOM: A402

DESCRIPTION

This study investigates how firms strategically adapt to anti-ESG legislation, where institutional pressures for environmental sustainability are reversed. While existing research has primarily focused on firms’ responses to positive ESG shifts, little is known about their behaviours under negative policy changes. We argue that firms’ responses to anti-ESG legislation are not merely a reversal of pro-ESG behaviours. Instead, due to competing stakeholder demands and policy uncertainty, firms may strategically reduce environmental performance in areas with low but long-term societal impact, such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, while maintaining or even enhancing practices in areas with high but immediate societal impact, such as toxic releases. We further argue that the effect of anti-ESG policies on these two aspects of firm environmental performance is moderated by two factors: firms’ prior environmental performance and the extent of pressure from environmental NGOs. Using the staggered enactment of anti-ESG laws across U.S. states from 2021 to 2023, we apply a difference-in-differences approach to analyse changes in firms’ GHG emissions and toxic releases. Our findings offer insights into how firms navigate reversed institutional pressures and balance regulatory signals with long-term strategic considerations.

GUEST BIO

王鹤丽教授现为新加坡管理大学李光前商学院战略管理讲席教授（Janice Bellace Professor）、研究生院院长、长江学者讲座教授，曾担任Academy of Management Journal和Academy of Management Review的副主编，以及Management Organization Review的咨询编辑。王鹤丽教授的研究聚焦于企业资源基础理论、战略人力资本、利益相关者管理和企业社会责任，众多研究成果发表于战略与组织领域顶级期刊，包括Academy of Management Review、Academy of Management Journal、Strategic Management Journal、Organization Science和Journal of International Business Studies等。

TIME/DATE: 2025.3.27  14:00

CLASSROOM: A308

ABSTRACT: 

Chance-constrained programming (CCP), as an important class of optimization-under-uncertainty models, has been employed in many high-stakes decision-making problems. In this paper, we study a contextual robust model of joint CCP with piece-wise convex constraints of uncertain coefficients and binary decision variables. To harness contextual information for boosting decision performance with appealing statistical guarantees, and to improve solution scalability, we develop a predictive ambiguity set that lifts an $L^\infty$ optimal transport (OT) counterpart and houses a general multivariate regression model with correlated errors. Under several regularity conditions, we show that the solution of the proposed lifted $L^\infty$-OT based contextual model remains feasible with high probability under the true distribution of uncertainty. In particular, the worst-case chance converges to the true underlying counterpart at a polynomial rate with respect to both dimensions of the random parameters and the contextual covariates, which provides attractive finite-sample feasibility guarantees and asymptotic consistency for our model solution. Furthermore, we extend the framework to incorporate a non-parametric kernel regression approach, deriving additional finite-sample performance guarantees. Optimization-wise, we develop exact solution methods for the proposed framework, tailored to commonly used OT cost functions. These include a reformulation scheme of mixed-integer conic program that exploits linearization with derived valid inequalities, and a Benders decomposition scheme that exploits the decomposability of the lifted $L^\infty$-OT model to enhance the scalability. Finally, we validate the model’s robustness, the value of capturing contextual information, its finite-sample performance, and its computational efficiency through a redundancy allocation testing problem using both simulated and real-world datasets.

GUEST BIO:

王曙明：国科大经管学院教授、博士生导师。研究方向：预测驱动型最优化、鲁棒优化、统计与计量学习及其在运筹管理的应用。研究成果发表于管理科学著名期刊《Operations Research》，《Production and Operations Management》以及《INFORMS Journal on Computing》等。目前担任“中国管理现代化研究会”理事，“中国优选法统筹法与经济数学研究会-风险管理分会”常务理事以及“中国运筹学会-决策科学分会”常务理事。担任Elsevier旗下运筹学著名国际期刊《Computers & Operations Research》部门主编，同时担任决策科学旗舰期刊《Decision Sciences》副主编以及运营管理著名期刊《Production and Operations Management》编委。

TIME/DATE：2025.3.27  15:30

CLASSROOM：A308

ABSTRACT：

Armed with automated matchmaking rules, B2B gig economy platforms solicit labor from the crowd to fulfill the needs of enterprise clients and generate revenue from repeated orders. To this end, we endeavor to identify focal considerations in the design of matchmaking rules and validate the effectiveness of these considerations in meeting the interests of platforms, clients, and service providers. To identify matchmaking considerations, we interviewed employees of a B2B gig economy platform for container truck road transportation. Thematic analysis on primary data reveals situational and experiential fit as focal considerations in designing matchmaking rules. Empirical analysis on secondary operational data was conducted to validate the effectiveness of situational and experiential fit on order operational efficiency, platform profitability and truck driver income. Analytical results indicate that experiential fit exerts a predominant effect on order dispatching and execution performance cared by clients but a negative effect on financial performance cared by platform and service providers whereas the role of situational fit in several business processes remains insignificant despite generating more profit per order. Empirical findings not only attest to the instrumental role of experiential fit when developing matchmaking in B2B gig economy platforms, but they further reveal that striking a balance between situational and experiential fit is dependent on the tradeoff between operational efficiency and financial profits for catering to the interests of different parties on platform.

GUEST BIO：

Chee-Wee Tan is a Professor at the Department of Management and Marketing in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). Before joining PolyU, Chee-Wee is a Professor w/ Special Responsibilities in Research Excellence at Copenhagen Business School (CBS). Chee-Wee received his PhD in Management Information Systems from the University of British Columbia. His research interests focus on design and innovation issues related to digital platforms. His work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals such as MIS Quarterly (MISQ), Journal of Operations Management (JOM), Information Systems Research (ISR), Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS), and the Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS), among others. Chee-Wee is holding or has held Honorary and Guest Professorship positions at Chongqing University (CQU), Lingnan University (LNU), Monash University Malaysia (MUM), the University of New South Wales (UNSW), the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC), the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, and Zhejiang University (ZJU). Apart from being a Senior Editor for MISQ, Chee-Wee has served or is currently serving on the editorial boards for ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice (DLT), DSS, EJIS, Industrial Management & Data Systems (IMDS), IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management (IEEE-TEM), Information & Management (I&M), Information Systems Journal (ISJ), Internet Research (IntR), JAIS, Journal of Computer Information Systems (JCIS), Journal of Management Analytics (JMA), JMIS, and MISQ. Finally, Chee-Wee is the Vice President of Publications for the Association for Information Systems.

TIME/DATE: 2025.3.21 16：00

CLASSROOM: A305

ABSTRACT: 

Airports are constantly battling congestion. The challenge? Balancing demand and capacity while keeping operations efficient and resilient. In this talk, we will explore how predictive models —capturing passenger flows, flight trajectories and weather impacts — can be integrated with optimization to support smarter decision-making. From strategic slot allocation to tactical air traffic flow management, I will showcase how data-driven approaches bridge the gap between prediction and action. Drawing on real-world applications from Portugal, Singapore, and Brazil, we will see how analytics is shifting airport capacity management from reactive to proactive.

GUEST BIO:

Nuno Ribeiro is an Assistant Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and Deputy Director of the Aviation Studies Institute. During his doctoral studies, he gained valuable insights through visiting research positions at MIT (2016) and Carnegie Mellon University (2017). His expertise in Operations Research methods applied to aviation has earned recognition from both academia and industry, with awards including the Ana Valicek Silver Medal (AGIFORS, 2018), Best PhD Dissertation (INFORMS-AAS, 2019), and Best Research Paper (INFORMS-AAS, 2021). His work on Terminal Airspace Operations was also shortlisted for the ATM Awards 2023, alongside leading industry entities. Asst. Prof. Ribeiro currently serves as Vice-Chair of the Aviation Applications Section of INFORMS.