Informs Annual Meeting Phoenix 2018

INFORMS Phoenix – 2018

MC11

3 - Social Media for Disaster Management: A Study of Hurricane Sandy Lu Yan, Indiana University, 1309 E. 10th St, Bu 570c,

3 - Discrimination in Global Sourcing: Field Experiments on Alibaba Ruomeng Cui, Emory University, 1935 Ridgemont Lane, Decatur, GA, 30033, United States, Jingyun Li, Meng Li, lili Yu Past research has found discrimination in Business-to-Customer online marketplaces. However, there has been little study on suppliers’ discrimination behavior on B2B platforms in the context of global sourcing. We investigate whether price and racial discrimination of suppliers against retailers exists in B2B marketplaces across countries. We conducted two field experiments on Alibaba.com, one of the largest global procurement platforms in the world. Further, we investigate the mechanism behind and explore negotiation tactics to mitigate discrimination. 4 - Demand Volatility in Supply Chain Networks William Schmidt, Cornell University, 314 Sage Hall, Ithaca, NY, 14850, United States, Nikolay Osadchiy, Jing Wu Demand volatility can adversely impact the firm’s ability to match its supply with its demand, resulting in higher operational costs. As demand propagates upstream in a supply chain, its volatility can be amplified due to the bullwhip effect. We empirically examine this phenomenon in the context of a supply chain network and shed light on how firms may strategically mitigate its consequences. n MC12 North Bldg 126A Analytics for Food Safety in Global Supply Chains Sponsored: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt Sponsored Session Chair: Yanchong Zheng, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States 1 - Contextualizing Food Safety in China with Respect to the Supply Chain Nicholas J. Renegar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States We consider the problem of food safety from the regulator’s perspective. What risk drivers lead to adulteration in food, and how should regulators determine which companies to test? We hypothesize that thinking of companies in terms of the agricultural supply chain can help to 1) identify the risky layers in the supply chain, and 2) identify the risky companies. Working with a large database of food safety tests collected from the Chinese FDA websites, we find supporting evidence for how this approach can help regulators, and we also find evidence that this approach is not currently being used in creating regulatory policy. 2 - Systemic Risk Management of Food Supply Chains Qi Yang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States Due to China’s dispersed agricultural supply chain, regulatory agencies have complicated decisions with regard to the focus of their testing. Some examples include how to allocate resources, and how to coordinate between the various regulatory agencies. Using data collected on China FDA food safety tests, along with data describing the farms and wholesale markets in Zhejiang, we used supply chain analytics to explore these questions. Our work with this data has already yielded several insights to identify key risk drivers in the supply chain and Yanchong Zheng, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 100 Main Street, E62-578, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States, Yasheng Huang, Shujing Wang We empirically study how China’s governance strength is associated with food safety risks across different regions. We develop a set of multifaceted measures of city-level governance based on objective, factual data, as opposed to basing on perceptional data in the most widely used governance indicators in social sciences. We leverage a unique dataset of domestic food sampling conducted by national-, provincial-, and city-level food regulators in China to examine the association. Our results highlight the different channels through which governance impacts food safety risks at a granular level. 4 - Food Insecurity Analytics: Improving Chronic Disease Control via Food Pantries in USA Luffina Huang, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States, Mario Wijaya, Keith Woh, I. Tang Lo This paper explored an unprecedented insight into the way of connecting food insecurity with the prevalence of two chronic diseases, obesity and diabetes, in U.S. via machine learning algorithms and data visualization geographically. While food banks are striving against food insecurity, large numbers of people in need cannot benefit due to improper ingredients in donated food for chronic-diseases patients. This paper showed food pantries provided limited help in control of food insecurity with chronic disease factors, and the most critical, proposed novel views in improving this problem. to determine the optimal allocation of testing resources. 3 - Governance and Quality Control in China

Bloomington, IN, 47401, United States, Alfonso Pedraza Martinez In this research, we use Facebook data from five benchmark organizations that responded to Hurricane Sandy, 2012 and study the social conversation between relief organizations and social media users at different disaster stages. By analyzing all the organizations’ posts and users’ comments, we find that informational support is most effective during disaster response. Yet, there is a mismatch between the actionable information that organizations post and the one that users are interested in. Thus, besides posting actionable information directed to the victims, organizations should post more information targeting potential donors and volunteers. 4 - Predicting Drug Recalls using Social Media Data Hyunwoo Park, The Ohio State University, 2100 Neil Ave, 632 Fisher Hall, Columbus, OH, 43210, United States, George Ball, Hessam Bavafa, Christian Blanco Pharmaceutical quality is a topic of chief concern, and regulators are tasked with reviewing data on an ongoing basis so they can issue recalls when problems are identified. Given the potential harms at stake, there is great interest in improving the algorithms by which quality issues are identified. In our paper, we use a big data approach using text analysis of social media data to predict drug quality risks, i.e., the likelihood of drug recalls. Our approach leverages sentiment analysis combined with reviewer characteristics to show how social media data can aid quality management. 5 - Scalability of Follower Bases on Social Media Platforms for Humanitarian Operations Eunae Yoo, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, United States, Elliot Rabinovich, Bin Gu For humanitarian organizations, increasing the scale of their follower bases on social media platforms is important to efficiently distribute information. With more followers, organizations can directly reach more users and communicate with a larger audience. Our study evaluates the drivers of the expansion of humanitarian organizations’ follower bases in times of normalcy and emergency. We formulate a structural model to examine when users decide to follow an organization and estimate the model using Twitter data from before and after a recent earthquake. Among our results, we find that the type of content and the frequency of content release affect users’ decisions to follow humanitarians. n MC11 North Bldg 125B Joint Session MSOM/Practice Curated: Empirical Studies in Operations Sponsored: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/iFORM Sponsored Session Chair: William Schmidt, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14850, United States 1 - Supply Networks: Does Industry Matter Manpreet Singh Hora, Georgia Institute of Technology, Scheller College of Business, 800 West Peachtree Steet NW, Atlanta, GA, 30308, United States, Marcus Bellamy, Soumen Ghosh We demonstrate differences in supply networks of focal firms in three different industries. In this study, we highlight the extent to which the industry context plays in terms of the network structural characteristics and firm performance, where the characteristics of an average representative firm in each industry vary considerably. 2 - Global Supply Chains and Cross-border Financing Jing Wu, City University of Hong Kong, Department of Management Sciences, Rm 7-233, Lau Ming Wai Academic Building, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Yu Zhang Financial globalization is still far from complete four decades after the end of the Bretton Woods System largely due to transaction costs and informational frictions. In this study, we ask if global supply-chain relationships help firms access cross-border financing in the international capital markets. Comparing two firms that are otherwise similar, we observe the firm that has formed global supply-chain relationship(s) to have more cross-border financing after the supply chain formation. This result is supported empirically by all major financing vehicles, including stock cross-listing, bond issuance, bank loans, and M&A deals.

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