【Speaker】Rachel Q.Zhang, Associate Professor, HKUST

【Topic】Group buying under quantity discount

【Time】2009-9-25 (Friday) 10:30-12:00

【Venue】Weilun 453, Tsinghua SEM

【Language】English

【Host】Department of Management Science and Engineering

Abstract:

When a seller offers quantity discounts, interested buyers may either self-organize or rely on a third party to aggregate their purchasing quantities to obtain lower prices, referred to as group buying. A group buying mechanism is a method that determines the amount each buyer will purchase and the price each buyer will pay. In this paper, we analyze buyers' purchasing behavior and surplus given a seller's quantity discount schedule under both the uniform price (where all buyers pay at the price obtained by the group) and non-uniform price group buying mechanisms. We also compare buyers' purchasing quantities and surplus under different group buying mechanisms and when buyers buy alone.

About the speaker:

Rachel Q. Zhang is Associate Professor in Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She received her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences in 1994 from Northwestern University and was previously a faculty member in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at University of Michigan, and the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. Her research interests lie in the general area of operations management and the interface of operations, finance and marketing. Her research has appeared in such journals as Operations Research, Management Science, Interfaces, IIE Transactions, Naval Research Logistics, and Advances in Applied Probability. She received an honorable mention in the INFORMS Nicholson Paper Competition in 1994 and an early-career award (CAREER) from the US National Science Foundation in 1995.