The Supply Chain Resource Cooperative (SCRC) invites you to join us for an in-person, one-day academic workshop on Friday, November 21, 2025, “Doing Good With OM and OR.”

We will have six great speakers from Georgetown University, North Carolina State University, Northeastern University, the University of California (Berkeley), the University of Maryland, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The workshop is open to Faculty, Postdocs, and Ph.D. students (Postdocs and Ph.D. students are encouraged to attend!)

Date: Friday, November 21, 2025
Time: 8:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Location: Nelson Hall, Room 2405 (MBA Classroom) New Location
Virtual Parking Permit: Attendees driving to the workshop should purchase a virtual parking permit. The permit will allow you to park in the Dan Allen parking deck which is right across the street from Nelson Hall. The permits are available for purchase starting on 11/14 and cost $10. Please purchase a permit before driving to the workshop. Click here for instructions on how to purchase a permit.
Map: Click here for a map of where to enter/exit the Dan Allen parking deck

*For out of town attendees, we recommend reserving a room either at the Aloft on Hillsborough Street (https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/rdura-aloft-raleigh/overview/) or the Stateview Hotel on Centennial Campus (https://www.stateviewhotel.com/). The Aloft is within walking distance of the venue.

Registration

*Registration is free; however, please do not register if you cannot commit to attending. Space is limited to 60 people, an accurate headcount is necessary for us to plan for food and parking.
Submit your registration >>

Agenda

Speakers

Wedad J. Elmaghraby
Dean’s Chair of Operations Management
Senior Associate Dean for Faculty
University of Maryland
Robert H. Smith School of Business

Presentation Title: Impact of Markdown Price Strategy on Returns
Abstract: A substantial proportion of purchases in the fashion industry are returned, representing around $890 billion in merchandise annually. This study investigates how different discount strategies influence net sales, and in particular, return rates. Our analysis focuses on three key factors influencing the effectiveness of discount strategies in enhancing net sales: customers’ uncertainty about a product’s post-purchase value, the post-purchase leverage effect of bundle discounts, and customer inattention to pricing details. Collaborating with one of Turkiye’s largest fashion retailers, we use structural estimation to evaluate bundle discounts in comparison to per-item discounts. Our findings reveal that net sales under bundle discounts can outperform per-item discounts by 15.61% when the post-purchase leverage effect is utilized effectively. However, bundle discounts may underperform when this leverage is absent or poorly implemented. Additionally, we find that customers often exhibit inattention to pricing details, resulting in an overestimation of a product bundle’s value at the time of purchase, which subsequently contributes to higher return rates.

Saman Lagzi
Assistant Professor
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Kenan-Flagler Business School

Presentation Title: Restaurant Assortment Optimization for (Office) Meal Delivery Platforms
Abstract: We study the problem an office meal delivery platform faces every day. Such platforms connect client firms to restaurants, by offering a menu of compatible restaurants to all the employees in an office. We model the problem as a capacitated joint assortment optimization on a bipartite graph with supply and demand nodes. We tackle this problem using a Linear Programming relaxation of a reformulation of the original model, and by leveraging the rather soft nature of the capacity constraints in practice, we devise an asymptotically optimal assortment sampling algorithm. In collaboration with one of North America’s largest office meal delivery platforms, we test the performance of our LP-based sampling algorithm in a carefully controlled field experiment. Our results suggest that our methodology improves the platform’s per-employee profit and revenue by at least 14%, and 11%, respectively. This improvement is achieved by carefully matching firms with restaurants with shorter distances while maintaining attraction and variety.

John Lowrey
Assistant Professor
Northeastern University
D’Amore-McKim School of Business

Presentation Title: Retail food donations and operational efficiency
Abstract: Retail food donations to food banks are a cornerstone of corporate social responsibility. While prior research has associated food donations with stronger revenue performance, their role in shaping inventory management efficiency remains less understood. Using transaction-level donation records from Donor Source Reports paired with store production data from NielsenIQ’s TDLinx database, we apply stochastic frontier analysis to examine how donations influence store-level efficiency. Our analysis shows that (1) food donations are positively linked to efficiency; (2) the relationship between donations and efficiency follows an inverted U-shape; and (3) donations boost efficiency more in highly deprived areas and less in more affluent ones. These findings highlight that social responsibility and operational efficiency represent complementary capabailities.

Onkar Malgonde
Assistant Professor
North Carolina State University
Poole College of Management

Presentation Title: How Does a Curation Algorithm Influence User Content Generation on a Social Media Platform? Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment
Abstract: We develop an agent-based model of users’ content consumption and generation to hypothesize that platform’s decision to introduce a curation algorithm leads to decrease in the volume, quality, and diversity of content generated. To empirically evaluate our hypotheses, we leverage a natural experiment setting in China: Sina Weibo, largest social media platform, introduced a curation algorithm in 2012 whereas Tencent Weibo, the second-largest social media platform, did not. Using data on 2,192 users between February 2012 and November 2012, we perform a synthetic difference-in-difference analysis by comparing users’ behavioral changes on these two platforms. Our findings suggest that introduction of a curation algorithm discourages users’ content generation: users post 19% less content, 32% shorter content, and 27% less diverse in topics. Our findings have important implications for research on curation algorithms and platform governance.

Sytske Wijnsma
Assistant Professor
University of California (Berkeley)
Haas School of Business

Presentation Title: Smarter Products, Shorter Lifespans The Environmental and Social Cost of Embedded Software
Abstract: Rapidly developing embedded software has put pressure on the lifespan of hardware, increasing e-waste. This paper examines how supply chains address obsolescence through legacy software support or hardware overbuilding. We analyze the impact of integrated versus decentralized supply chain designs and assess how Extended Producer Responsibility influences firm incentives, environmental outcomes, and consumer welfare.

Şafak Yücel
Associate Professor
Associate Director at the Business of Sustainability Initiative
Georgetown University
McDonough School of Business

Presentation Title: Additionality of Carbon Offsets: Project-specific vs. Standardized Baselines
Abstract: Developers generate carbon offsets by investing in emissions-reduction projects to receive two sources of revenue: project revenue, e.g., from the electricity sold in a renewable energy project, and offset revenue based on offsets issued by a non-profit carbon registry. The registry ensures additionality, i.e., the offset should represent one unit of reduction from the developer’s business-as-usual emissions—what the developer’s emissions would have been without the offset revenue. Although environmental groups raise greenwashing concerns against non-additional offsets, ensuring additionality is challenging because it requires assessing project revenue, which is the developer’s private information. In practice, the registry assigns a baseline to represent business-as-usual emissions through one of the two methods: Under the project-specific method, a developer self-reports its business-as-usual emissions to the registry, which then inspects the report and assigns reported emissions as the baseline if it accepts the project. Under the standardized method, the registry assigns a common baseline to a group of similar projects. It is unclear which method leads to fewer non-additional offsets, greater reduction in emissions, and should be chosen by a registry. We analyze these economic and environmental implications.