講座題目：《When Ethics Meet Algorithms: Corporate Social Responsibility in Personalized Pricing and Network Effects》

主講嘉賓：盧立建 香港科技大學

講座主持：陳俊霖

講座時間：2025年12月24日（星期三）16：00-18：00

講座地點：沙河校區(qū)學院樓四號樓318會議室

講座摘要：As big data and advanced analytics become more prevalent, companies are increasingly adopting personalized pricing strategies. While these strategies can boost profitability, they also raise concerns about fairness and consumer privacy, often leading to reduced price transparency. This paper explores how corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives can reconcile the tension between profit-driven personalized pricing and consumer welfare in digital markets characterized by network effects and price (un)observability. We show that, without CSR, price discrimination can diminish consumer surplus and firm profits due to coordination failures among consumers stemming from network externalities and price opacity. Our findings reveal that CSR initiatives -- especially those that factor consumer surplus into pricing -- create a self-regulating mechanism that: (1) aligns consumer incentives, (2) enhances firm profits beyond standard discriminatory pricing, and (3) leads to Pareto improvements by increasing surplus for all market participants. We validate our findings across various contexts, including different network structures and sequential purchasing, illustrating their generalizability and robustness. These results underscore the vital role of CSR in fostering efficiency and sustainability in personalized pricing. Our findings offer managers a strategic framework for ethical pricing that strengthens competitive positioning in digital markets and provide valuable guidance for policymakers, suggesting that CSR incentives can effectively address concerns related to algorithmic fairness.

嘉賓簡介：Professor Lu is an Assistant Professor at HKUST School of Business and Management. His primary research interests are in the area of data-driven decision-making with a focus on applications in e-commerce, pricing and revenue management, supply chain management, healthcare and service systems, finance-operations interface. His work has been recognized by world leading journals such as Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Mathematics of Operations Research, Production and Operations Management. He is recipient of Finalist of INFORMS George Nicholson Student Paper Competition and Second place of POMS College of Supply Chain Management Student Paper Competition .

Prior to joining HKUST Business School, Professor Lu took senior leadship in three sectors: finance, e-commerce, and online display advertising. Professor Lu was Founder and CIO at UniQuant Capital, where he lead quantitative research team and manage 3 billions quantitative long-short hedge funds; Executive Director at China Innovation Fund leading PE/VC investment in TMT area with 150 billions AUM; Vice President at Goldman Sachs Asset Management leading quantitative factor portfolio research and management with 15 billions USD AUM; Senior Research Scientist at Knight Capital Group on high frequency trading, at Amazon.com on e-commerce and logistic optimization, at AppNexus.com on online display advertising market.

主辦單位：管理科學與工程學院