Category: Recent Seminars

Date: 01 June 2026, Monday Time: 13.30 – 14.30 Place: MA-330 "Contract Design for Coffee Supply Chain Coordination under Uncertainty and Strategic Default" by Mert Hakan Hekimoğlu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Abstract  In many agricultural supply chains, particularly in emerging economies, trade occurs under significant price and yield uncertainty. Farmers must commit resources at the beginning of the crop season, while wholesale prices at harvest remain uncertain. Forward contracts are commonly used to secure supply and manage risk, but when market prices rise sharply, farmers may strategically default and sell on the spot market instead. The international coffee market provides a salient example, where recent high-price episodes in Colombia have triggered delivery shortfalls and breaches of forward contracts. Motivated by these disruptions, we study contract design when farmers can strategically default…

Date: 15 May 2026, Friday Time: 13.30 – 14.30 Place: MA-330 "Aversion, Adoption, and Agents: Rethinking the Consumer–AI Relationship" by Oğuz A. Acar King’s College London Abstract  Despite a substantial literature documenting consumer aversion to artificial intelligence, real-world adoption tells a more complicated story. This talk presents new evidence from a digital art marketplace where, contrary to the dominant narrative, early adopters in fact prefer AI-labelled work: across more than 470,000 artworks, AI-labelled pieces sell at substantially higher rates, with the effect changing based on visual properties. Combining field data, propensity score matching, and controlled experiments, we unpack the mechanism and discuss its implications for how we think about AI acceptance. I situate the work within a broader research programme on the consumer–AI relationship, from earlier evidence on aversion in AI…

Date: 08 May 2026, Friday Time: 13.30 – 14.30 Online "Leveraging to Lend: A Theory of Lax Credit” by Igor Makarov London School of Economics https://zoom.us/j/3370698252?pwd=OWRmQ1hNNWhRWng2QnhsTENzK1hGUT09&omn=94726702062 Meeting ID: 337 069 8252 Abstract  A pervasive feature of financial intermediation is the use of third-party deal-by-deal capital in addition to balance sheet capital to finance investment activity.  This paper studies how third-party capital and decentralized fundraising jointly shape competition, screening, and welfare in intermediated credit markets. We show that third-party capital serves a novel economic function: it allows informed intermediaries to separate screening decisions from surplus sharing, thereby intensifying competition and reducing the cost of capital to firms. Yet it also amplifies a dynamic adverse selection externality, resulting in excessively lax screening and overinvestment. Consequently, although entrepreneurs benefit from intermediary third-party leverage,…

Date: 06 May 2026, Wednesday Time: 10.30 – 11.30 "AI Integration in Services: Configurations with Humans, Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms, and Their Design in the Absence of Humans” by Aslı Gül Kurt HEC Montreal Abstract  AI technologies are increasingly integrated into services, yet research has largely treated AI as a support tool for human agents. This research investigates how AI can be integrated into service delivery in ways that earn and sustain consumer acceptance. Answering this requires addressing three understudied topics: the configurations of human-AI service providers, the cognitive processes that shape consumer responses to these configurations, and the factors that drive acceptance in the absence of a human agent. This research program addresses each in sequence. Existing work offers limited guidance on how combinations of human and AI presence…

Date: 29 April 2026, Wednesday Time: 10.30 – 11.30 "The Green Transition: Evidence from Corporate Green Revenues” by Philipp Krüger University of Geneva Abstract  We introduce a novel measure of revenues from green products and services for publicly listed firms worldwide that is not spanned by prior sustainability metrics used in the literature. We show that green revenues grew at an accelerated pace after the Paris Agreement. This growth has been driven by innovative US companies converting green patents into green revenues, as well as by firms with higher sustainability-focused institutional ownership before the Paris Agreement. Furthermore, we examine the stock returns of firms with green revenues and find modest evidence of a green alpha in the post-Paris period, primarily concentrated in US stocks. Bio Philipp Krüger is a Professor…

Date: 27 April 2026, Monday Time: 12.30 – 13.30 "Empowered but not Emancipated: Deferential Entrepreneurship under Coercion" by Jeffrey McMullen Imperial College London Abstract  How can organizational actors exercise entrepreneurial agency when they are embedded in coercive “total institutions” marked by tight rules, surveillance, and discretionary punishment? Building on institutional work, practice-driven institutionalism, micro-power, and emancipatory entrepreneurship, this essay develops a mechanism-based account of deferential entrepreneurship under coercion. Using stylized incidents from The Shawshank Redemption as a disciplined illustrative device—a “thought experiment with pictures”—the essay explains how dominated insiders introduce new practices without incurring punishment and why such efforts typically yield localized, revocable empowerment rather than emancipation. The mechanism specifies that an actor (i) identifies an authority’s pain point, (ii) frames a practice with professional legitimacy and deference cues, and…

Date: 22 April 2026, Wednesday Time: 10.30 – 11.30 Online "CBDCs, Payment Firms, and Geopolitics" by Tobias Berg Geothe University Frankfurt Abstract  We analyze the effect of a major central bank digital currency (CBDC) – the digital euro – on the payment industry to find remarkably heterogeneous effects. Stock prices of U.S. payment firms decrease, while those of European payment firms increase in response to positive announcements on the digital euro. Bank stocks do not react significantly. We estimate a loss in market capitalization of USD 127 billion for U.S. payment firms, vis-à-vis a gain of USD 23 billion for European payment firms. Our results emphasize the medium-of-exchange function of CBDCs and point to the important role of geopolitical considerations in designing financial architecture. Bio Tobias Berg is Professor of…

Date: 10 April 2026, Friday Time: 16.30 – 17.30 Place: MA-330 "Consumer Attention to Data Disclosure: Evidence from Mobile Apps" by Kelly D. Martin Colorado State University Abstract The mobile apps that mediate everyday activities make data disclosures a routine part of people’s lives, but in fragmented prior research, the privacy threats associated with data disclosures dominate. To compliment such perspectives, the current research proposes a novel conceptualization that reflects how consumers respond when transparency policies make data disclosure practices salient. A large-scale, natural field experiment involving more than 700,000 app reviews, surrounding the introduction of Apple’s Privacy Nutrition Labels, reveals a negative relative effect of transparency on consumer attention to data disclosures. Yet as these labels diffused, and transparency became a platform standard, consumers seemed to attend specifically to…

Date: 01 April 2026, Wednesday Time: 10.30 – 11.30 Place: MA-330 "Balancing Exploration and Exploitation: The Role of Intuition–Analysis Versatility and Paradoxical Leadership" by Amir Mehralian Exeter Abstract  While ambidexterity research has largely emphasized macro-level mechanisms, the micro-level foundations that allow employees to balance exploration and exploitation remain underdeveloped. Yet, because organizational ambidexterity ultimately emerges from employees’ ability to enact both activities, uncovering these micro-foundations is essential. Drawing on dual-system theory and the paradox perspective, we theorize that cognitive flexibility enables employees to enact ambidexterity through intuition–analysis versatility—cognitive strategies to switch between and integrate intuitive and analytic modes of processing. Moreover, paradoxical leadership serves as a crucial boundary condition that legitimizes and motivates cognitively flexible employees to deploy versatile cognitive strategies and translate them into ambidextrous behaviors. Evidence from a…

Date: 27 March 2026, Friday Time: 13.30 – 14.30 "AI for Economics and Finance" by Lin William Cong Cornell University https://zoom.us/j/8909487052?omn=96499682404 Meeting ID: 890 948 7052 Abstract I characterize modern AI development as featuring two core themes: (i) goal-oriented end-to-end optimization in large modelling space, and (ii) generative pre-trained foundational models that enable economic world models and AI agents. Combining the insights from both, I identify promising directions in AI for Social Science Research. To start, I introduce Goal-Oriented Algorithms in Large Space (GOALS) involving transformer-based reinforcement learning or panel trees, which are particularly suited for answering questions related to optimal decision-making and modelling grouped heterogeneity in social science research. In several specific financial applications, I show how GOALS can effectively and flexibly manage investment portfolios, generate test portfolios or latent factors for evaluating extant…