To deepen theunderstanding of the up-to-date business practice and cutting-edge academictopic of faculty and students of the Business School, namely, the typical modelof online car hailing platforms in sharing economy, Professor Ge Jianxin, PartySecretary of the Business School, Central University of Finance and Economics(CUFE), invited Dr. Wang Yulan, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Businessof the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, to give an academic lecture. Theresearch of Dr. Wang has been published in leading academic journals, includingManagement Science,Operations Research,Manufacturing &Service Operations Management, andProduction and Operations Management.Her research interests include supply chain management, sustainability ofoperations management, and behavioral issues in operations management. She isnow a senior editor forProduction and Operations Management, anassociate editor forOmega, and a member of the Editorial Advisory BoardofTransportation Research Part E. Faculty and students of the CUFEBusiness School had been counting down the days for this academic exchange.

This lecture, held from 2:00p.m. to 4:00 p.m. on May 13, 2019 at Room 615 of the main teaching building on CITYCampus, was themed on Gender-Based Operational Issues Arising from On-DemandRide-Hailing Platforms: Safety Concerns, Service Systems, and Pricing and WagePolicy. The recent development of “Lady Car” platforms seeks to address safetyconcerns raised by female passengers and drivers. It is a dedicated systemwhere passengers are matched with drivers of the same gender. Building on thegame theory, Dr. Wang and her team made an initial attempt to examine whetherand how gender-specific services could enable such platforms to address femalesafety concerns and harvest more profits via mathematical modeling. It wasfound that gender-specific dedicated systems could be a profitable way forride-hailing platforms to address safety concerns raised by female passengersand drivers. It was also pointed out that a key obstacle for such platforms tosteer toward the dedicated system lies in the small size of female labor force,which undermines the system’s economies of scale. The “equal policy” underwhich platforms have to provide the same price and wage for both female andmale subsystem increases their burden.

Dr. Wang gave aninformative and novel lecture, opening up a new perspective for allowingfaculty and students of the School to examine the operations of onlinecar-hailing platforms. All participants were greatly intrigued. After thelecture, participants raised a series of questions and shared their own opinionsabout Dr. Wang’s research, to which she responded patiently. All faculty andstudents present said it was a rewarding lecture and looked forward to moresimilar academic lectures given by excellent domestic and foreign researchersin the field of management in the future.    

This lecture was fundedby 2019 CUFE Themed Academic Lecture Sponsorship Program “Sharing Economy: UserCognition and Organizational Growth.”