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Working Papers & Work In Progress

Empirical Market Design in Surplus Food Marketplaces

with Alexandra Y. Dong *, Auyon Siddiq

Under review.

Keywords: Food waste, structural estimation, integer optimization, market design, entry games, Too Good to Go

  • Accepted to INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing (RM&P) Section Conference, 2025

  • Accepted to Marketplace Innovation Workshop, 2025

Abstract: Commercial food waste is a major urban sustainability challenge, and secondary food marketplaces have emerged to sell surplus inventory at a discount. We study how platform pricing affects seller entry and total sales (i.e., food waste diverted) using a structural model of spatial consumer demand and seller entry, estimated with hourly data from 465 bakeries across four U.S. cities. Our discrete-optimization–based estimator greatly accelerates entry-cost estimation. We find that sales are primarily limited by seller participation rather than consumer demand, and that giving sellers price control induces excessive competition and exit, sharply reducing equilibrium sales. The results support platform-set prices — so long as discounts are not too steep — to boost participation and reduce food waste.

Public Transit Time and Fare Design: Ridership Maximization Under Income Disparity

with Owen Q. Wu

  • Second Place, Best Flash Talk, Early-Career Sustainable Operations Management Workshop, 2025

Optimization for Whale Preservation

with Yu Gong *, Jue Wang, Jessica Morten (NOAA), Rachel Rhodes (Benioff Ocean Science Lab)

  • Cornell Atkinson Rapid Response Fund ($9,965), 2025

  • Jean F. Rowley Research Excellence Fund ($5,000), 2025

* student coauthor     equal contribution
Authorship is listed in alphabetical order, following the tradition in Operations Management, unless stated otherwise.

Accepted Papers


Planning Bike Lanes with Data: Ridership, Congestion, and Path Selection. 

with Sheng Liu and Auyon Siddiq 

Management Science (2025), Vol. 71, No. 9: 7631–7654 

Keywords: urban planning, network design, estimation, analytics, sustainability

  • WinnerINFORMS Public Sector Operations Research (PSOR) Best Paper Award, 2023 

  • Winner, POMS College of Sustainable Operations Student Paper Competition, 2022

  • Second Place, INFORMS IBM Best Student Paper Award, 2022 

  • Second PlaceSection on Location Analysis (SOLA) Best Student Paper Award, 2023 

  • Finalist, MSOM Society Award for Responsible Research in Operations Management, 2025

  • Finalist, INFORMS Workshop on Data Mining and Decision Analytics Best Paper Award (Applied Track), 2022

  • Accepted to MSOM Sustainable Operations SIG, 2022

  • Media coverage: UCLA Anderson ReviewRotman Research Insights

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[Abstract]

Abstract: Urban infrastructure is essential to building sustainable cities. In recent years, municipal governments have invested heavily in the expansion of bike lane networks to meet growing demand, promote ridership, and reduce emissions. However, re-allocating vehicle capacity in a road network to cycling is often contentious due to the risk of amplifying traffic congestion. In this paper, we develop a method for planning bike lane networks that accounts for ridership and congestion effects. We first present an estimator for recovering unknown parameters of a traffic equilibrium model from features of a road network and observed vehicle flows, which we show asymptotically recovers ground-truth parameters as the network grows large. We then present a prescriptive model that recommends paths in a road network for bike lane construction while endogenizing cycling demand, driver route choice, and driving travel times. In an empirical study on the City of Chicago, we bring together data on the road and bike lane networks, vehicle flows, travel mode choices, bike share trips, driving and cycling routes, and taxi trips to estimate the impact of expanding Chicago's bike lane network. We estimate that adding 25 miles of bike lanes as prescribed by our model can lift ridership from 3.9% to 6.9%, with at most an 8% increase in driving times. We also find that three intuitive heuristics for bike lane planning can lead to lower ridership and worse congestion outcomes, which highlights the value of a holistic and data-driven approach to urban infrastructure planning.


Partnerships in Urban Mobility: Incentive Mechanisms for Improving Public Transit Adoption.

with Auyon Siddiq and Christopher S. Tang

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (2021), Vol. 24, No. 2: 956 -- 971 

Keywords: public transit, public-private partnerships, subsidies, incentives, Mobility as a Service (MaaS)

[Abstract]

Abstract: In this paper, we present and analyze two incentive mechanisms for increasing commuter adoption of public transit. In a direct mechanism, the government provides a subsidy to commuters who adopt a "mixed mode", which involves taking public transit and hailing rides to/from a transit station. The government funds the subsidy by imposing congestion fees on personal vehicles entering the city center. In an indirect mechanism, instead of levying congestion fees, the government secures funding for the subsidy from the private sector. We present a game-theoretic model to capture the strategic interactions among relevant stakeholders and examine the implications of both mechanisms on the stakeholders. Our findings offer cost-effective prescriptions for improving urban mobility and public transit ridership.

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