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 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, restricting third-party financing can raise social…

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…