【Mingli lecture 2022, Issue 19】
Speaker: Zhang Wei Assistant Professor, The University of Hong Kong
Time: April 7, 2022 (Thursday) 10:00-11:30
Tencent conference number: 788 739 261
Brief introduction:
Gig workers on on-demand service platforms are well-known for their hard effort, which has brought them many traffic accidents but not necessarily a sizeable income. After recent warm public discussions about Chinese gig workers’ welfare, the Chinese government announced a set of regulative guidelines. We study the effectiveness and efficiencies of two major regulations related to gig workers’ welfare. One is to deconcentrate the platform’s service request allocation, and the other is compulsory labor insurance that partially transfers the cost incurred by traffic accidents to the platform. We focus on a stylized economic model wherein a platform sets the worker wage, the service price, and the request allocation algorithm under each type of regulation. In addition, a group of heterogeneous service agents decide their respective effort levels, and customers decide whether to request the service based on their respective willingness to pay and sensitivity to delay.
Speaker Profile:
Dr. ZHANG Wei received his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree from Tsinghua University. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and then joined the University of Hong Kong as an assistant professor in Innovation and Information Management. He focuses on studying and solving practical problems related to high-technology supply chains. By modeling and analyzing strategic firm interactions in technology adoption, his research work tried to understand how innovative suppliers should effectively promote and sell their new component technologies and how product manufacturers should efficiently adopt the new technologies and financially support their suppliers in developing the technologies. His research papers have been published in top academic journals such as Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Production & Operations Management, and Academy of Management Journal.
Organizer: (Department of Management Science and Logistics, Research and Academic Exchange Center)
