报告题目：Screening Complementary Suppliers under Correlation Ambiguity
报 告 人： Zhaolin Li教授
工作单位：悉尼大学
报告时间：2026-9-23 13:00-16:00
报告地点：腾讯会议596-945-106
报告摘要：We study procurement of perfectly complementary components from two suppliers with symmetric binary private costs, known marginal distributions, but uncertain cost correlation. In the correlation-informed benchmark, unbalanced quantities become strictly valuable when the retail price and correlation are sufficiently high. This threshold result implies that deliberate unmatched procurement is a device for reducing information rents rather than an operational inefficiency. We then compare max–min and minimax regret when the buyer has no additional information about correlation, so every coupling consistent with the known marginals is admissible. Under this complete correlation ambiguity, unbalanced quantities add no max–min value and a balanced mechanism is optimal. Minimax regret behaves differently: it trades off being too unbalanced at low correlation against being too balanced at high correlation and therefore retains unbalanced quantities in at least one report state. We further show that the value of additional correlation information depends on which environments it rules out. Excluding low-correlation environments increases the value of unbalanced procurement, whereas excluding high-correlation environments favors more balanced procurement. This qualitative contrast between max–min and regret extends to random demand: max–min continues to admit full balance, whereas full balance is excluded under regret when mean demand is sufficiently high.
报告人简介：
Dr. Zhaolin (Erick) Li received his Ph.D. in Business Administration from The Pennsylvania State University, a Master of Commerce in Accounting from The University of New South Wales, and a Bachelor of Engineering in Materials Science and Industrial Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has been a faculty member at The University of Sydney Business School since January 2009. Prior to his academic career in Sydney, Dr. Li worked at Ernst & Young LLP and City University of Hong Kong.
Dr. Li has established a strong international research profile with 12 publications in UTD Premier 24 journals. Dr. Li was recognized twice (2017, 2018) as one of the Asian Top 25 Scholars in his field, based on publications in International Journal of Production Economics. Dr. Li is currently an Associate Editor for OMEGA in its Department of Innovative Applications and an Associate Editor for Decision Science in its Department of Sourcing, Procurement/Purchasing and Logistics.
