Christopher Tang

• PhD
• Professor at University of California, Los Angeles

Since the early aughts, open innovation platforms such as InnoCentive and HeroX have helped seekers (firms, SMEs, startups) develop and launch open innovation contests by inviting external (independent) solvers to submit their solutions. In an open innovation contest, an award is given to the top-quality submission, where the quality of each submis...

executive summary: This essay examines supply chain de-risking driven by two forces: (1) the renewed concerns of the U.S. and its allies about supply chain resilience and (2) China's long-standing strategy to redefine the global order. main argument A defining feature of global supply chains is they are powered by material, information, financial,...

The relationship between natural hazards and supply chain operations is bidirectional: Natural hazards can disrupt supply chain operations, and supply chain operations can influence the causes of natural hazards. The former motivates us to discuss four key steps for managing supply chain risk in the presence of these hazards: (a) identifying risk,...

Despite an increasing emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), there is a noticeable gap in empirical research concerning its implications, particularly within the manufacturing sector. In response, we scrutinize the impact of DEI commitment on publicly traded manufacturing corporations through the lens of signaling theory. We employ an...

Businesses, governments, and society are increasingly focused on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Because supply chain management is an integral part of most businesses, it is imperative to integrate supply chain considerations into ESG measures. However, existing ESG measures focus primarily on the internal operations of compani...

With soaring labor and logistics costs in developing countries, supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic triggered Western firms to “reshore” some of their offshore operations (performed in-house or outsourced) for certain strategically important products or production processes from foreign countries to their home countries. Although...

We start with four questions facing managers and researchers regarding how social responsibility can or should be incorporated into supply chains. These questions pertain to (1) delineating the scope and context of supply chain operations, (2) dealing with many definitions and objectives of social responsibility, (3) figuring out how to work with t...

In 2015, the United Nations countries signed up to achieve 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership by 2030. However, the trend of progress toward achieving these goals indicates that none of the 17 goals may be achieved by 2030 globally. We first provide a foundation for OM researchers to help...

E-commerce platforms have an informational advantage over their third-party sellers, leading to the common belief that a platform's market entry would harm sellers with similar products. However, unlike traditional retail competition, the platform and its sellers have aligned incentives: the platform's commission depends on the seller's revenue, an...

Problem definition: Crowdfunding goes beyond raising funds. Entrepreneurs often use crowdfunding to solicit feedback from customers to improve their products and may therefore prefer to launch their crowdfunding campaigns using basic versions of their products with fewer features. However, customers may not be persuaded by a campaign if the product...

Should a firm begin its production even before its new product is approved? In a competitive market with time‐sensitive consumers, a firm may choose to adopt the “concurrent process” by conducting the approval process and the production process in parallel so that the product will become available for sale once approved. However, to avoid incurring...

Consumers dread shopping during peak hours, and the Covid‐19 pandemic has created additional safety concerns about overcrowding in addition to long waiting times. In view of consumer's congestion aversion, should competitive brick‐and‐mortar grocery stores charge higher prices during congested peak hours to smooth demand? To examine “whether and wh...

Because of a growing population and shrinking arable land, the world is facing a global food crisis. One important solution could be to subsidize farmers to sustain their production so that they can produce more food for consumers and earn more money for themselves. An efficient subsidy program should also aim to reduce income inequality among farm...

Because of the informational advantage of online marketplaces (i.e., platforms), it is a common belief that a platform’s market entry will be detrimental to third-party sellers who sell similar products on the platform. To examine the validity of this belief, we conduct an exploratory analysis using the sales data for a single product category prov...

Many companies are under pressure to improve pay transparency; however, its impact on their agents and principals remains unclear. As a way to investigate the upside and downside of pay transparency, we conduct our study based on a scenario in which agents have “cognitive bias” (namely, over‐ or under‐confident). We also capture the notion of “soci...

Motivated by the challenge of allocating scarce resources from the federal government to different states during the COVID‐19 pandemic, this paper studies optimal schemes for allocating scarce resources to agents with private demand information under different favoritism structures. Through an investigation of a mechanism design model that aims to...

The response to COVID-19 as a public health emergency raised questions about preparedness against future pandemics. The US Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) with medically critical items such as ventilators and personal protection equipment for major public health emergencies proved to be inadequate in the first half of 2020. We seek to address ho...

Several industries that provide services to customers (e.g., public utility and transportation) charge higher prices during peak hours to smooth demand. With technologies (e.g., electronic shelf labels) enabling retailers to change prices easily within each day, should supermarkets use peak-hour pricing? To examine this question formally, we introd...

Surge pricing has been used to coordinate supply and demand in the ride‐sharing industry, but its causal effects on driver behavior remain unclear. This motivates us to examine how surge pricing causally affects driver earnings and labor supply by leveraging a unique quasi‐experiment, in which a leading ride‐sharing company in China introduced surg...

Multinational corporations have benefited tremendously from free trade in the past few decades. However, the dynamism of international relations, paired with the global recession, has rekindled the debate over frictionless trade. In this study, we examine how trade friction, created by tariff trade barriers, affects the operational performance of d...

Can two competing on-demand service platforms be profitable in equilibrium? This question is well-studied for firms competing purely on price in a single-sided market, but it is not well-understood for competing service platforms that use price to influence passenger demand and wage to influence driver participation in a “two-sided” market. To fill...

The chaotic response of the US Strategic National Stockpile to COVID‐19 during 2020 highlighted the inadequacy of the inventory‐based approaches to disaster response. This paper examines the integration of stockpile inventory, backup capacity, and standby capability to meet the disaster‐related surge in demand in the future. We present a two‐period...

Do firms suffer from negative long‐term business performance after being exposed for violating environmental regulations? We empirically examine this question using all 1542 environmental incidents committed by 418 public Chinese manufacturers listed on the Shanghai/Shenzhen Stock Exchange from 2004 to 2013. We use the Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM...

Since the inaugural issue published in 1992, Production and Operations Management (POM) has grown phenomenally in terms of the number of submissions and publications and journal impact factor. In this 30th anniversary issue of the journal, contributing authors examine the past and the future of operations management (OM) research, addressing emergi...

Distributing scarce resources such as COVID‐19 vaccines is often a highly time‐sensitive and mission‐critical operation. Our research was prompted by a significant obstacle that the U.S. and other nations encountered during the early months of the COVID‐19 vaccination campaign: most COVID‐19 vaccines require two doses given three or four weeks apar...

Supply chain fairness refers to the practices that members in a supply chain treat each other. Due to imperfections of a competitive market, some members could exploit their positions or circumstances that enabled them to gain excessive advantage over others. Such unfair practices could be in the form of unfair prices, unfair trade, or unfair pay....

Problem definition: The paper focuses on an innovative bank-intermediated trade finance contract, which we call dynamic trade finance (DTF, under which banks dynamically adjust loan interest rates as an order passes through different steps in the trade process). We examine the value of DTF, the impact of process uncertainties, and the associated in...

On August 13, 2020, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi explained that Uber is backing Proposition 22 that would exempt it from Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), a California law that would require Uber to treat its drivers as employees with benefits effectively on January 1, 2020. To win over California voters, Uber and Lyft were considering to shut down their servic...

On August 13, 2020, Uber chief executive officer (CEO) Dara Khosrowshahi explained that Uber is backing Proposition 22 that would exempt it from Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), a California law that would require Uber to treat its drivers as employees with benefits effective January 1, 2020.1 To win over California voters, Uber and Lyft were considering to...

We examine the impact of information provision policies on farmer welfare in developing countries where farmers lack relevant and timely information for making informed decisions regarding which crop to grow and which market to sell in. Based on our equilibrium analysis, we find the following results. When market information is offered free of char...

To alleviate farmer poverty in developing economies, two common farmer subsidy schemes are either input-based that intends to reduce farmers’ input purchasing costs or output-based that aims to lower farmers’ output processing costs. By analyzing a stylized model that captures yield heterogeneity across farmers who engage in quantity competition, w...

Governments in many developing countries often use minimum support price (MSP) as a mechanism to (i) protect farmers from fall in crop market prices and (ii) improve availability of different essential crops to consumers. Among different MSP schemes, we focus on credit-based MSPs under which a government will not take any possession of a crop; inst...

In developing countries, farmers lack information to make informed production, manufacturing/selling decisions in order to improve their earnings. To alleviate poverty, various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and for-profit companies have developed different ways to distribute agricultural information about market price, crop advisory, and fa...

In developing economies, smallholders operate their farms by applying their own specialized knowledge and exerting costly efforts. To raise overall productivity, NGOs and governments are advocating various knowledge sharing and learning platforms for farmers to exchange a variety of farming techniques. Putting altruism aside, we examine the overall...

Companies often post user-generated reviews online so that potential buyers in different clusters (age, geographic region, occupation, etc.) can learn from existing customers about the quality of an experience good and cluster preferences before purchasing. In this paper, we evaluate two common user-generated review provision policies for selling e...

Besides using earmark budget to support farmer cost subsidies, governments in many developing countries use Minimum support price (MSP) as an alternative subsidy scheme to (i) safeguard farmers' incomes against vagaries in crop price, and (ii) ensure sufficient crop production. Among different MSP schemes, we focus on the credit-based MSP scheme un...

Many firms believe that the way to cope with environmental violations by their contract manufacturers is through greenwashing initiatives which they hope will protect them from collateral damage. Chris Lo, Christopher Tang, Paul Zhou, Andy Yeung, and Di Fan disagree, arguing that turning a blind eye to polluters in their supply chains can cause maj...

Overview Uncertainty and risk have become increasingly salient constructs as global challenges, like COVID-19, geopolitical tensions, and climate change, recast the operating environment of many firms. Addressing these new sources of uncertainty and risk has required organizations to develop novel approaches to solving their operational problems, w...

This paper examines the implications of credit-based MSPs in a setting that is more general than those examined in the research literature. Our setting entails a market comprising of two types of farmers (with heterogeneous production costs): “myopic” farmers (who make their crop selection and production decisions based on recently observed market...

Besides using earmark budget to support farmer cost subsidies, governments in many developing countries use Minimum support price (MSP) as an alternative subsidy scheme to (i) safeguard farmers' incomes against vagaries in crop price, and (ii) ensure sufficient crop production. Among different MSP schemes, we focus on the credit-based MSP scheme un...

In many developing countries, crop minimum support price (MSP) is a subsidy scheme to (i) improve farmer welfare by safeguarding farmers’ incomes against vagaries in crop price and (ii) improve consumer surplus by ensuring sufficient crop production. Among different mechanisms to operationalize an MSP scheme, we focus on credit-based MSPs under whi...

Accessibility of Electric Vehicle (EV) charging stations is an important factor for adoption of EV, which is an effective green technology for reducing carbon emissions. Recognizing this, many governments are contemplating ideas for achieving EV adoption targets, such as constructing extra EV charging stations directly or offering subsidies to enti...

Multinational corporations (MNCs) have benefited tremendously from free trade in the past few decades in the form of cost reductions, resource advantages, and market expansion. However, the dynamism of international relations and a global recession have rekindled the debate over frictionless trade. In this study, we examine how trade friction, crea...

Female user (driver and rider) safety is a serious concern for ride‐hailing platforms. One way to address this concern is to migrate from the traditional “pooling” system that matches riders with drivers without considering gender to a “hybrid” system with a “female‐only” option. Will such a hybrid system result in a win‐win‐win outcome for all inv...

The COVID-19 pandemic severely tested the resilience and robustness of supply chains for medically critical items and various common household goods. Severe and prolonged shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators in the United States have revealed vulnerabilities in the supply chains of such essential products in a time of ne...

In many developing countries, governments often use minimum support prices (MSPs) as interventions to (i) safeguard farmers’ income against crop price falls and (ii) ensure sufficient and balanced production of different crops. In this chapter, we examine two questions: (1) What is the impact of MSPs on the farmers’ crop selection and production de...

Problem definition: The U.S. influenza (flu) vaccine supply chain is decentralized and experiences frequent supply and demand mismatches caused by two key factors: (1) the vaccine production process (yield) is highly uncertain; and (2) individuals are self-interested and do not completely take into account positive and negative externalities that t...

Large companies were concerned about their supply chains with environmental and social sustainability and disruption from natural disasters, conflict, and trade disagreements even before the advent of Covid‐19. The additional challenges presented by Covid‐19 in 2020 are “extreme” in being distinct from supply chain risk in that not just particular...

To support the 2020 MSOM Data Driven Research Challenge, JD.com, China’s largest retailer, offers transaction-level data to MSOM members for conducting data-driven research. This article describes the transactional data associated with over 2.5 million customers (457,298 made purchases) and 31,868 stock keeping units (SKUs) over the month of March...

A company must develop the "AAA" capabilities of agility, adaptability, and alignment in its supply chain to compete in a dynamic global environment profitably. However, as businesses face new challenges with increased environmental and social sustainability expectations, they must expand these AAA supply chain capabilities to people, planet, and p...

Problem definition: When sourcing through a procurement service provider (PSP), the PSP often collects rebates from unethical manufacturers in developing countries (as referral fees) that are “hidden” from the retailers. Recognizing that a PSP has a strong incentive to solicit quotes from unethical manufacturers, we examine a situation in which the...

We examine a (large) manufacturer's bribery decision (to bribe or not to bribe) arising from a procurement auction under “disparate corruption pressure” when another (small) manufacturer is known to offer the auctioneer (i.e., the intermediary) a bribe in exchange for the “right of first refusal”. We discover that the large manufacturer should refu...

Problem definition: To alleviate farmer poverty, governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are developing different mechanisms for disseminating market information to farmers in developing countries. This paper examines whether a wider dissemination of information will always benefit farmers. Academic/practical relevance: The characteriz...

To influence demand, some online retailers post messages (e.g., “5 units or less left in stock”) on their product pages to signal impending stockouts. These “scarcity” messages provide consumers “partial” inventory information, revealing only an upper bound on the number of units available for sale. To examine the impact of these messages, we obtai...

On August 13, 2020, Uber chief executive officer (CEO) Dara Khosrowshahi explained that Uber is backing Proposition 22 that would exempt it from Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), a California law that would require Uber to treat its drivers as employees with benefits effective January 1, 2020.1 To win over California voters, Uber and Lyft were considering to...

In many developing countries, micro-retailers in remote rural places struggle to survive due to high inventory replenishment costs caused by lack of efficient infrastructure and distribution networks. Consumers, in turn, suffer from higher prices and limited accessibility of products provided by these micro-retailers. Some of these products are nec...

When deciding whether to adopt an innovative product, consumers often experience different levels of anxiety that prompt them to resist purchase. In some cases, consumers’ anxiety is mitigated by “validation” through externality (e.g., the number of early adopters). To reduce consumers’ anxiety, firms can also invest in “familiarization” through pr...

Regulating on-demand ride-hailing services (e.g., Uber and DiDi) requires a balance of multiple competing objectives: encouraging innovative business models (e.g., DiDi), sustaining traditional industries (e.g., taxi), creating new jobs, and reducing traffic congestion. This study is motivated by a regulatory policy implemented by the Chinese gover...