Past Speakers

Dr. Ahmet Kuyumcu

Founder & CEO at Prorize

Friday, March 31, 2023
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST

Bio

Ahmet Kuyumcu founded Prorize with the vision of building dynamic pricing solutions that will help global companies manage their prices effectively and achieve sustained revenue growth. Ahmet spearheaded the pricing solution that won the 2017 Franz Edelman Award. He has built end-to-end RM systems across various industries, including hotels, gaming resorts, airlines, self-storage, apartments, senior housing, automotive, distribution, telecommunication, high-tech manufacturing, broadcasting, and online retailing. Previously Chief Scientist at Zilliant, Ahmet pioneered price optimization algorithms for Zilliant’s product suite from scratch. He also taught graduate-level courses in pricing and RM at the University of Texas at Austin and the Indian School of Business. Ahmet has authored and published several articles in professional journals and presented dozens of technical articles at conferences and worldwide. He holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Operations Research from Texas A&M University.

How Revenue Management is Transforming Rent-Driven Industries

Revenue Management (RM) is a new frontier for rent-driven industries such as multi-family housing (apartment), self-storage, and senior housing. These industries share some of the same challenges: They have meaningful supply constraints, highly seasonal demand, and uncertain lengths of stay. They also practice many incentives and promotions, and existing customer rate increases must be optimized.

Ahmet Kuyumcu’s presentation will highlight RM challenges and opportunities for rent-driven industries, and he will discuss their similarities and differences. He will then detail how the self-storage industry is adapting to the solution framework, which has been actively used by dozens of large owners and operators worldwide. This RM solution won the 2017 Franz Edelman Award, the world’s most prestigious award for achievement in the practice of advanced analytics and operations research.

Robert Greening

President, TJX Canada (Winners, HomeSense, Marshalls)

Friday, March 31, 2023
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST

Bio

Robert Greening has a rich retail background with diverse management and principal roles. Prior to his current roles as President, TJX Canada, he was Senior Vice-President for Macy’s and Vice-President for Neiman Marcus. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Marketing from Michigan State University and an MBA from the University of Michigan.

Mr. Greening has extensive experience building and leading teams through high growth and turnaround environments with a focus on: merchandising, marketing, product development, global sourcing, off-price apparel, multi-channel development, customer service, and luxury businesses. He has also operated successfully in the Private Equity retail sector and as a Board Director.

Minha Hwang

Principal Architect at Microsoft

Friday, February 3, 2023
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST

Bio

A marketing data scientist and causal inference expert, Minha Hwang is currently a Principal Architect at Microsoft. Minha holds a double PhD in marketing science/materials science & engineering and is a former staff engineer & architect at McKinsey and a former Assistant Professor in Marketing at McGill University.

Format

Minha Hwang shared his knowledge on applied causal inference in tech industries and data science consulting. Specifically, Minha focused on the following topics:

Increasing online experimentation agility

Abstract: For data-driven decision-making, A/B testing is used as a gold standard to quantify the impact of product or service changes on users. Oftentimes, the key goal metric such as user engagement or user retention is not very sensitive, which greatly challenges experimentation agility. I will discuss two different ways to increase online metric sensitivity: (1) data-driven proxy metric development, and (2) machine learning-based variance reduction methods. These methods or alternative metrics allow firms to reduce traffic requirements and run more experiments.

Promotion ROI measurements and promotion counterfactual simulation app building

Abstract: Promotion is a big spending item for consumer-packaged goods (CPG) companies and retailers. CPG companies invest ~20% of their revenue in trade promotion. 59% of promotions lost money (72% in the U.S.) Best-in-class CPG promotions returned 5 times more than the least efficient. I will describe how causal demand modeling based on POS data can help retailers and CPG manufacturers to measure promotion ROI and incremental profits from past promotions. This model also provides the foundation for promotion simulators for promotion planning and promotion optimization.

Alfonso Troisi

President of Nespresso Canada

Friday, November 18, 2022
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST

The career path of Alfonso Troisi and his expertise within premium branding in global markets.

The discussion was moderated by MMR student Surpreet Kaur.

Bio

Alfonso Troisi, an Italian citizen, is the Business Executive Officer (President) of Nespresso Canada, based in Montreal, since September 2020. Prior to Nespresso Canada, Alfonso was the Business Executive Officer of Nespresso Greater China Region for 7 years, based in Shanghai. Alfonso was also the President of SwissCham Shanghai. Alfonso’s previous roles include Head of Marketing for Metro Cash & Carry Asia, based in Singapore, as well as Managing Director for Marie Brizard Group Greater China and Commercial Director Diageo China/Hong Kong, both based in Shanghai.

Alfonso early career was in Europe, where he held several local and international commercial leadership and project management roles, based in countries such as Italy, France, Spain and the UK. Alfonso speaks fluently 5 languages and holds a BA Degree from Bocconi University in Milan and an MBA from IMD in Lausanne.

Aldo Bensadoun

Founder of the Bensadoun School of Retail Management

Wednesday, November 9, 2022
9:30 pm – 11:30 pm EST

An intimate student-led fireside chat with Aldo Bensadoun

The Q&A session was moderated by MMR students Vicky Constantopoulos and Sidnee Patterson.

Bio

Aldo Bensadoun, a McGill graduate (BCom’64, LLD’12) and founder of the Bensadoun School of Retail Management, is Executive Chairman and founder of the Aldo Group Inc., a privately held Montreal‐based company specializing in fashion footwear and accessories. He founded the company in 1972 and currently operates over 500 stores in Canada, the U.S. and Israel. Following primary and secondary education in France, Mr. B pursued studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York before attending McGill University.

Mr. B is actively involved with a number of community and charitable organizations including Mt. Sinai Hospital, the Jewish General Hospital, L’Hôpital Sainte Justine, the Canadian Association for Aids Research (Canfar) and its American counterpart, the American Association for Aids Research (Amfar).

Marshall Van Alstyne

Professor of Information Systems, Questrom School of Business, Boston University

Friday, April 16, 2021
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST
(Virtual Presentation)

Platforms & Strategy: How Network Business Models are Changing the Shape of Industry

Business models are changing. Giant firms like Apple, Alibaba, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Tencent are inevitable. Yet few firms understand how they operate. Competition in the Internet era resembles that of the industrial era but for the opposite reason. The mindset, concepts, and tools of the product manager are inadequate to handle challenges of the platform orchestrator. Economic forces have changed innovation, marketing, human resources, operations, and strategy. Network business models are the major factor disrupting existing businesses. This talk presents ideas from a bestselling book and award winning research that explain why platforms beat products. Then it tells you what strategies help you manage it.

Bio

Marshall Van Alstyne (@InfoEcon) is the Questrom Chair Professor of Management at Boston University, with expertise in platforms and information economics. His work explores how ICT affects firms, products, innovation, and society. Work or commentary have appeared in journals such as Science, Nature, Management Science, American Journal of Sociology, Strategic Management Journal, Information Systems Research, MISQ, The Economist, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. He has made significant contributions to platform economics and strategy as co-developer of the theory of “two-sided” markets. He is coauthor of the international bestseller Platform Revolution and a top 50 all-time article for Harvard Business Review. Research has received more than 15,000 citations, two patents, NSF Career, SBIR, iCorp, and IOS awards, and a dozen different academic awards. He received a BA in computer science from Yale and MS and Ph.D. in information systems economics from MIT. He is a husband and dad, who loves dogs, exercise, travel, and questions of governance.

Tinglong Dai

Associate Professor, Operations Management and Business Analytics, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

Friday, April 9, 2021
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST
(Virtual Presentation)

Transforming COVID-19 Vaccines into Vaccination: Challenges and Opportunities for Management Scientists

Amid the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, glimmers of hope have appeared via the miraculous breakthroughs of multiple effective and safe COVID-19 vaccines that were developed with record speeds. Yet, the endgame of the pandemic is not vaccines; it is vaccination. The daunting challenge of vaccinating the world offers ample investigative opportunities for management scientists who are interested in improving the efficiency and equity of healthcare systems. In this talk, I provide a broad overview of COVID-19 vaccination design and highlight a recent work comparing various vaccine rollout policies.

Bio

Tinglong Dai is an Associate Professor of Operations Management and Business Analytics at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, with leadership positions at Hopkins Business of Health Initiative and Johns Hopkins Institute for Data-Intensive Engineering and Science. As an internationally renowned expert in healthcare operations management, Prof. Dai has been recognized by the Johns Hopkins Discovery Award, Wickham Skinner Early Career Award, INFORMS Public Sector Operations Research Best Paper Award, and POMS Best Healthcare Paper Award. His research has been published in leading academic journals, including Harvard Business Review, Management Science, M&SOM, Marketing Science, and Operations Research. He serves as an associate editor for M&SOM, Naval Research Logistics and Health Care Management Science, and a senior editor for Production and Operations Management. Prof. Dai has appeared in national and international TV such as CNBC, PBS NewsHour, and Sky News, and has received coverage in ABC News, AP News, Barron’s, Bloomberg, CBC, CBS News, CNBC, CNN, Fast Company, Fortune, Globe and Mail, KHN, MarketWatch, Modern Healthcare, NBC, Public Radio International, U.S. News & World Report, USA Today, Washington Post, and WIRED. Prof. Dai earned his PhD (2013) and MS (2009) in Operations Management/Robotics from Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, in addition to an MPhil (2006) in Industrial Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. For more about Prof. Dai, please visit tinglongdai.com

Brian Ward

Professor, Department of Medicine, Division of Experimental Medicine, McGill University

Friday, April 9, 2021
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST
(Virtual Presentation)

COVID-19 Vaccines: From Concept to Vaccinating Almost 8 Billion People

In the 15 months since the world first 'met' SARS-COV-2, this 100nM virus has killed more than 2.7 million people and cost the global economy $16-17 (USD) trillion. The development of vaccines began within days of the isolation and sequencing of SARS-COV-2 and represents the best hope for bringing some semblance of normalcy back to all of our lives. The current status and future directions of anti-COVID vaccines will be reviewed.

Bio

Dr. Brian Ward received medical training at McGill University, the University of London and Johns Hopkins (Internal Medicine, Tropical Medicine, Infectious Diseases & Microbiology). His research training began as a Rhodes scholar (1977-1980) and continued at Johns Hopkins (1986-1990). He joined the McGill medical faculty in 1991 where he is currently full professor. He has served as chief of Infectious Diseases (2002-2006), medical director of the National Reference Centre for Parasitology (1996-2018), deputy director of the MUHC Research Institute (Fundamental Science: 2008-2015), associate director of the JD MacLean Tropical Diseases Centre (1996-2018) and director of the McGill Vaccine Study Centre (1994-2020). He is currently chair of the Institutional Advisory Board for the Canadian Institutes for Health Research Institute of Infection and Immunity and is the past-chair of the Canadian Association for Immunization Research and Evaluation, a national network of >200 vaccine investigators. Since 2010, he has served as Medical Officer for Medicago Inc. His research focuses on the development of novel vaccine platforms. He has published >250 peer-reviewed manuscripts/chapters and is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.

Michael D. Smith

Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University

Friday, November 13, 2020
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
(Virtual Presentation)

The Abundant University – Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World

Over the past quarter century new digital technologies have transformed nearly every sector of our economy—in each case creating abundant access, choice, interactivity and personalization for consumers. The one industry remarkably absent from this transformation is higher education. As COVID accelerates a long overdue transformation of our market, and it’s time for us to imagine what abundant access, choice, interactivity, and personalization could look like in the context of our business. In this talk I will draw on my prior research into the transformation of the entertainment industry, and my current research into the delivery of online education to address three key questions facing the academy today:

• Why do today’s digital technologies threaten to our longstanding business model?
• How is the transformation of higher education likely to play out in the market?
• What should educational institutions—and IS researchers—do to respond to this opportunity?

Bio

Michael D. Smith is the J. Erik Jonsson Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at Co-Director of the Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College. He received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering (summa cum laude) and a Master of Science in Telecommunications Science from the University of Maryland, and a Ph.D. in Management Science from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Professor Smith’s research uses economic and statistical techniques to analyze firm and consumer behavior in online markets, and he co-authored the book Streaming, Sharing, Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment (MIT Press, 2016) with Rahul Telang.

Alain Lemaire

Columbia University

Tuesday, November 5th, 2019
11:30 am-1:00 pm
Armstrong 265

The role of linguistic match between users and products

In this paper, we examine how the linguistic similarity between the language used by reviewers of a product and prospective customers’ own writing style can be leveraged to assess the match between customers and products. Applying tools from machine learning, Bayesian statistics, and computational linguistics to a large-scale dataset from Yelp, we find that the closer the writing style of a restaurant’s past reviews are to a prospective customer’s writing style, the more likely that customer is to write a review for that restaurant. This effect holds across restaurant types and is driven by the linguistic similarity of positive past reviews. Further, we find that similarity with respect to words related to leisure (e.g., family, wine, beer, weekend), biology (e.g., eat, life, love), as well as swear words are most influential in creating a match between customers and restaurants. Finally, matching in writing styles commonly associated with neuroticism and openness also predicts a customer’s likelihood to write a review. The current research suggests that preferences for products can be inferred from the similarity between prospective customers’ linguistic style (as well as the language used by other customers) to describe a product. Our results suggest that recommendation agents should incorporate linguistic matching as part of the recommendation algorithm

Bio

Alain Lemaire is a quantitative marketing researcher. He works in the areas of Social Media, Crowdfunding, News Media, and Recommendation Engines. These areas are rich in data, primarily rich in unstructured data, and are largely unexplored in the marketing field. To study these domains, he uses tools from Machine Learning, Bayesian Statistics, and Econometric.

Tesary Lin

Booth School of Business, University of Chicago

Wednesday, October 30^th, 2019
1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Armstrong 260

Valuing Intrinsic and Instrumental Preferences for Privacy

In this paper, I propose a framework for understanding why and to what extent people value their privacy. In particular, I distinguish between two motives for protecting privacy: the intrinsic motive, that is, a “taste” for privacy; and the instrumental motive, which reflects the expected economic loss from revealing one’s “type” specific to the transactional environment. Distinguishing between the two preference components not only improves the measurement of privacy preferences across contexts, but also plays a crucial role in developing inferences based on data voluntarily shared by consumers. Combining a two-stage experiment and a structural model, I measure the dollar value of revealed preference corresponding to each motive, and examine how these two motives codetermine the composition of consumers choosing to protect their personal data. The compositional differences between consumers who withhold and who share their data strongly influence the quality of firms’ inference on consumers and their subsequent managerial decisions. Counterfactual analysis investigates strategies firms can adopt to improve their inference: Ex ante, firms can allocate resources to collect personal data where their marginal value is the highest. Ex post, a consumer’s data-sharing decision per se contains information that reflects how consumers self-select into data sharing, and improves aggregate-level managerial decisions. Firms can leverage this information instead of imposing arbitrary assumptions on consumers not in their dataset.

Bio

Tesary is a PhD candidate in quantitative marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Her research focuses on how information and data moderate the relationship between firms and consumers. Her recent projects examine consumer privacy preferences, the impact of privacy policies, and analytics tools that adapt to the modern information environment.

Federica De Stefano

Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania

Tuesday, October 1^st, 2019
1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Bronfman 046

Do more able managers capture the value that they create? Manager's abilities, unit performance, and compensation

More able managers create more value for their employers. A central question in the study of strategic human capital is how much of that increased value is captured by those managers through their pay. We exploit unique restaurant and retail data to examine the relationship between persistent managerial contributions to profits and pay for middle and lower-level managers. Although we find substantial, persistent differences in managers’ contributions to store profitability, high-performing managers receive only 0.5 percent of the additional value that they create in higher pay. Additional analyses suggest that this decoupling between value creation and value capture may reflect compressed pay scales, ambiguity on the relative role of managers versus context in determining performance, and high-performing managers’ reluctance to leave the organization.

Bio

Federica De Stefano is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Wharton People Analytics Initiative at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines how firms create and capture value from human capital. In studying this topic, she has developed three interrelated streams of research that analyze: 1) the role of managers in shaping individual and organizational outcomes; 2) employee mobility; and 3) the use of non-standard work arrangements. Theoretically, her research seeks to speak to the literatures on human resource management and strategic human capital. Empirically, much of her work is quantitative and based on field studies in organizational contexts, with a focus on the restaurant industry. Federica holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration and Management, a M.Sc. in International Management, a BA in Management from Bocconi University in Milan (Italy), and a M.Sc. in Management Science and Corporate Management from Fudan University in Shanghai (China).

Dirk Van den Berghe

Executive Vice-President and Regional CEO of Walmart Canada & Asia

Fireside chat
Thursday, September 5th, 2019
4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Armstrong 365

Walmart: From Bricks and Mortar Retail to a Successful Omni-Channel Business

Dirk oversees all Walmart subsidiaries in Asia and in Canada. He also oversees Walmart’s global supply chain with sourcing offices in 20 countries. He is on the board of Flipkart, India’s leading Ecommerce company and was on the board of JD.com, one China’s leading Ecommerce companies.

Dirk has 30 years of international leadership experience across Europe, Asia and North America. Prior to his Walmart Asia and China roles where he oversees Walmart's global sourcing structure for 24 offices in 20 countries, Dirk was CEO of Walmart Canada beginning August 2014. He joined Walmart from the Delhaize Group, a leading global food retailer with operations in eight countries and three continents, where he enjoyed a 15-year career.

In addition to his broad international retail background, Dirk has two decades of experience teaching international business and strategy at leading universities across Europe, Asia and the United States. He also has more than a decade of diplomatic and trade experience as the International Trade Commissioner for the government of Belgium and the region of Flanders.

Dirk earned a Ph.D. in economics from Sofia University in Bulgaria, a Master degree in business administration from the State University of Ghent in Belgium, and speaks several languages, including English, French and Dutch.

David Yermack

New York University, Stern School of Management

Thursday, May 16, 2019
10:30 am -12:00 pm
Bronfman 410

Initial Coin Offerings: Financing Growth with Cryptocurrency Token Sales

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) have emerged as a new mechanism for entrepreneurial finance, with parallels to initial public offerings, venture capital, and pre-sale crowdfunding. In a sample of more than 1,500 ICOs that collectively raise $12.9 billion, we examine which issuer and ICO characteristics predict success, measured using real outcomes (employment and issuer failure) and financial outcomes (token liquidity and volume). Success is associated with disclosure, credible commitment to the project, and quality signals. An instrumental variables analysis finds that ICO token exchange listing causes higher future employment, indicating that access to liquidity has important real consequences for the enterprise.

Rafael Pass

New York University, Stern School of Management, Cornell University

Friday, May 10, 2019
10:30 am -12:00 pm
Bronfman 310

The Blockchain Protocol: Analysis and Challenges

We present an overview and analysis of Nakamoto’s famous blockchain protocol which underlies the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, demonstrating that the protocol satisfies some desirable security properties, assuming that a majority of the participants are honest (and as long as the parameters of the protocol are appropriate set as a function of the communication network). We next investigate challenges associated with Nakamoto’s protocol—game-theoretic stability and “wasteful” proof of work—and present new blockchain protocols that overcome them.

Bobbie Cochrane

Senior Technical Lead for Blockchain Capital Market Solutions at IBM

Tuesday, April 16, 2019
11:30 AM – 1:00 PM
Bronfman 410

IBM Blockchain

Bobbie Cochrane is an experienced Senior Research Scientist with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. Her research involves Blockchain, Scalability, IBM DB2,Cloud, Computer Science, and Enterprise Software.