Threshold Effects on Modeling Consumers’ Choice and Optimizing Firm’ Operations
讲座通知 2026 年 7 月 20 日（星期一）； 上午 10:00 - 11:30 信息管理与工程学院308室 上海财经大学（第三教学楼西侧） 上海市杨浦区武东路100号 主题 Threshold Effects on Modeling Consumers’ Choice and Optimizing Firm’ Operations 主讲人 Ruxian Wang Johns Hopkins University Dr. Ruxian Wang is a Professor with Tenure at Johns Hopkins University, Carey Business School. Before returning to academia, he worked in Hewlett-Packard Company for several years as a research scientist. He received Ph.D. from Columbia University, M.S. and B.S. from Nanjing University. His research and teaching interests include operations management, revenue management, pricing, discrete choice models, data-driven decision making. His articles appeared in the top-tier journals in his field, such as Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Operations Research, Production and Operations Management. 讲座简介 Threshold effects play important roles in consumers’ choice behavior and firms’ operations management. A threshold could be the reservation value, and the consumer does not consider any product whose utility is below the threshold. A consumer could form her consideration set by removing the products whose utility is lower than the largest by another threshold. Moreover, the traditional discrete choice model could be generalized to accommodate multiple purchases, in which a consumer purchases all products whose net utility exceeds a certain threshold. Consequently, threshold effects may have significant impact on firms’ operations management such as assortment planning and pricing. In this talk, we showcase several scenarios, in which consumers’ choice behavior under threshold effects can be characterized and the firm’ optimal or near-optimal operations strategy can also be analytically derived. Our analysis shows that misspecification of threshold effects may lead to poor demand forecast and significant revenue losses.
