Gender Inequality in Research Productivity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Value of High-Quality Logistics: Evidence from a Clash Between SF Express and Alibaba

Reducing Discrimination with Reviews in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from Field Experiments on Airbnb

Learning from Inventory Availability Information: Evidence from Field Experiments on Amazon

Oversight and Efficiency in Public Projects: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis

Information Sharing in Supply Chains: An Empirical and Theoretical Valuation

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Ruomeng Cui is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information System and Operations Management at the Goizueta Business School, Emory University. In her research, Professor Cui investigates how operations strategies create and deliver value in companies' digital transformation. Specifically, she studies how digitization reshapes how companies compete and operate. Her research has been recognized by various prizes including 2019 INFORMS Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) Paper Competition award, 2019 M&SOM Practice-Based Paper Competition award, 2017 INFORMS Behavioral Section Best Working Paper award, and 2014 POMS Supply Chain Management Student Paper Competition award. Professor Cui’s research has been widely covered by the media, including NPR, NPR Marketplace, Financial Times, Fox News, Fortune Magazine, and HBR.

Digital Retail

Platform Markets

Operations Strategy

Supply Chain

Data-driven Decision

Causal Inference

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The Robin Report

From apple juice to antibiotics: Coronavirus epidemic could cause U.S. shortages

Coronavirus likely to affect timing of phase one trade deal

Researchers: Women shouldering the burden of pandemic life more than men

Reducing Discrimination in the Sharing Economy with Reviews: Evidence from Field Experiments on Airbnb

Alibaba Aims to Deliver with $16bn Courier Venture

The Surprise of e-Commerce Delivery

Online shopping and fast shipping, what happens when things go south?

Businesses that Experience Delivery Outages Feel Long-term Impact

Logistics Strategy on Retail Platforms

Want to Improve Your Sales Forecast? Check Your Company’s Facebook Feed.

What Makes an Online Flash Sale Successful?

New Research Looks At Ways To Help Stop Airbnb Racial Discrimination

A Better Way to Fight Discrimination in the Sharing Economy

Research on airbnb shows a little knowledge goes a long way.

A better way to fight discrimination in the sharing economy

Is there a discrimination problem in the shared economy? 

According to research by Emory University’s Ruomeng Cui, users whose names suggest a certain race could result in discriminatory acts, particularly ignored or denied requests.

Cui and her colleagues set up fictional, thinly-populated Airbnb accounts with traditional Caucasian and African American names. Requests from African American names were accepted nearly 20 less often than those from guests with white names. The average acceptance rate of white guests was 48 percent compared to 29 percent among African-Americans.

But, by simply adding a positive review to the fictional account, results balanced — 56 percent acceptance for white guests and 58 percent for African American guests. Even negative reviews were found to eliminate discrimination in guest selection.

"This shows the cause of discrimination stems from the lack of information,” Cui says.

Users put more weight on details that are less obvious than names or perceived race, such as reviews and anecdotes. 

Cui and colleagues recommend platforms such as Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, LetGo or OfferUp encourage users to provide reviews and feedback whenever possible in order to eliminate discriminatory practices. 


Discrimination in the Shared Economy?

goizueta-faculty-member-uncovers-impact-of-remote-learning-on-educational-inequality

Goizueta Foundation Term Associate Professor  of Information Systems & Operations Management

In 2020, the world went into lockdown. Learning in school became learning from the couch. Rather than listening to teachers in-person behind a desk, high school students had to find a computer to stream their lectures and lessons.

What happens to educational inequality in a digital-first, remote-learning environment? Whereas students are traditionally bound by their brick-and-mortar schools and the limitations of funding in those areas, what happens when the walls are removed and students have access to the teachers, knowledge, and peers from other areas?

 Ruomeng Cui and co-researchers, Zhanzhi Zheng from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Shenyang Jiang from Tongji University, decided to find out. In their 2022 paper, currently under review, Cui and her colleagues looked at the performance of high school students in developing and developed regions of China.

We thought that remote learning might reduce the inequality gap in education because when students are learning off-line, they’re restricted by their local resources. “It’s quite obvious that developing regions don’t have good resources, experienced teachers, or competitive peers—they often have inferior educational resources in comparison to developed regions,” explains Cui, associate professor of information systems and operations management. “We thought the accessibility of remote learning could help reduce this knowledge gap and help students in developing regions improve their learning outcomes.”   Analyzing Education in Developed and Developing Areas The idea for the paper, “Remote Learning and Educational Inequality,” published earlier this year, stemmed from another of Cui’s papers, which looked at the academic productivity of women as a result of the COVID-19 lockdowns. “We wanted to study whether the switch to remote learning impacts educational inequality. Does it make it better or worse?” says Cui. “We are the first ones to offer empirical evidence on such a granular level about a large-scale data set.”  The group analyzed the Chinese college entrance exam from 2018 through 2020, which students take during the last few weeks of high school; the test score is a requirement for undergraduate admission in China. It’s common for high schools to announce the number of students who scored 600 or higher (out of 750 total points).

Using 1,458 high school exam results from 20 provinces, the group found that in 2020, when remote learning became the norm, “the number of students scoring above 600 points in developing regions increased by 22.22 percent,” in comparison to developed regions.

Remote learning significantly improved learning outcomes of students in developing regions. We should think about encouraging the adoption of remote learning in education However, Cui and her co-researchers wanted to go a step further. Because the entrance exams are summaries of student data, they surveyed 1,198 students to drill down and ensure that these results came from remote learning rather than other factors.

Respondents were asked to rate aspects of their remote-learning experience, such as access to digital devices, their proficiency in using software, how reliable their internet was, how they interacted with peers and teachers, and their access to online educational resources.

The researchers found that students in developing regions were able to better connect with peers and teachers, and the students believed that “their learning efficiency was greater” because of the remote learning.

Education inequality is not only a problem in China. It’s everywhere. It’s across the world. Having access to better educational resources online can be applied anywhere. However, the one caveat to their findings: Remote learning is beneficial, but students need devices and the infrastructure to support online learning, which is often lacking in developing regions or underserved areas.

“We need to support, build, and develop the digital technology capability that enables the effectiveness of remote learning,” says Cui.   Are you a reporter looking to know more about the impact COVID had on education and how inequality plays a role in how we educate students during a pandemic? 

Then let us help with your coverage and questions.

Ruomeng Cui is an Associate Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management at Emory University's  Goizueta School of Business.  

Ruomeng is available to speak with media regarding this topic - simply click on her icon now to arrange an interview today.



Goizueta Faculty Member Uncovers Impact of Remote Learning on Educational Inequality

do-wholesalers-discriminate-against-ai-in-procurement-practices

 If we deploy automation without thinking strategically about intelligence, too, isn’t AI likely to backfire on us?  Airplane manufacturer, Boeing, made headlines in 2019 for all the wrong reasons. Its 737 Max aircraft was indefinitely grounded after two fatal crashes in the space of just six months had claimed the lives of 346 people. Investigation into the accidents revealed that updates to an automated system – the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, known as MACS – had failed to integrate one of two intelligent sensors, meaning the system lacked a critical security backstop. As the aircrafts switched into autopilot mode shortly after takeoff, the error sent them both into fatal nosedives within minutes.

These tragedies highlight an issue with automation that needs more focused attention says Goizueta’s Ruomeng Cui, assistant professor of information systems and operation management. And it’s this: if we deploy automation without thinking strategically about intelligence too, is AI likely to backfire on us?

 Cui is an expert in operations strategies in digital retail and platform markets. To better understand the challenges surrounding automation and intelligence in operational processes, she teamed with Shichen Zhang of Tianjin University and Rutgers’ Meng Li to explore how AI brings value in the procurement space.
With Deloitte reporting that almost 45% of Chief Procurement Officers globally are now using, piloting, or planning to integrate AI into their operations, these insights should provide interesting food for thought, says Cui.

“AI isn’t just about being quicker, it’s also about being smarter. It can deliver automation but can also deliver predictive intelligence; and while these two dimensions might be correlated, one doesn’t necessarily imply the other – as the Boeing example demonstrates,” says Cui. From the tech perspective, there’s a lot of buzz about how AI is helping to drive decision-making, she adds. But there is still plenty that we don’t know about the operational dimensions to using artificial intelligence.

“With international procurement, you’re basically talking about big retailers going in and requesting prices for goods or products from wholesale suppliers. And that’s a process that could, in theory, lend itself very well to AI, since it can automate simple (and tedious) tasks over and over again. So there’s a significant potential gain in companies outsourcing this kind of task to the machine.”

But although the potential might be clear, Cui and her colleagues believe that simply automating these processes might not in fact yield optimal results; and could in fact work against buyers by encouraging suppliers to quote higher prices than they might in personalized, human transactions.

A full article detailing Cui’s research is attached, within it – several theories were explored.

 Who Comes Out Ahead on Price? Humans or AI Chat Bots? “We speculated about the possibility of wholesalers discriminating against the AI,” says Cui. “Specifically, we wanted to know if the sellers would quote higher prices to AI bots than they would to human buyers, because at the end of the day these bots are just machines; they don’t bring the authenticity or sincerity of human beings.”

When Machines are Smart, Discounts Rise “When wholesalers are just asked over and over for their prices, they know that they are dealing with a machine and the intuition is that the machine is not intelligent, that it doesn’t have market expertise, and that it isn’t capable of decision-making. There’s no incentive to build relationships or to engage in any kind of negotiating dynamic here.”

The topic is fascinating, and given the increase of AI in the workplace – a timely one. 

And, if  you are a journalist looking to cover this research or speak with Professor Ciu about the subjects of telework and productivity, simply click on her icon now to arrange an interview today.



Do Wholesalers Discriminate Against AI in Procurement Practices?

lockdown-teleworking-impacts-productivity-of-women-more-than-men

When the COVID-19 pandemic led countries all over the world to lock down their economies in early 2020, there was an unprecedented global shift to teleworking in white collar sectors. A trend that had been gathering traction was suddenly and exponentially accelerated and many of the world’s largest corporations, Google and Facebook among them, have announced plans allowing employees to work from home well into 2021 or indefinitely.

Remote working not only appears to work, but it appears to have a number of advantages—savings in office maintenance costs and time spent commuting, not to mention enabling organizations to safeguard productivity when there’s a major shock or crisis. But is it all good news? Or good news for all?

A new paper by Ruomeng Cui, assistant professor of information systems and operations management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School, reveals an important drop in the productivity of female academics around the world in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdowns. In fact, in the ten weeks following the initial lockdown in the United States, their productivity fell by a stunning 13.9 percent relative to that of male colleagues. And it’s likely to do with the disproportionate burden of responsibility for household needs and childcare that persistently falls on women, Cui said.

 “We know that gender inequality persists both in the workplace and at home, and we were curious to see how the lockdown scenario would attenuate or exacerbate the situation for women,” Cui said.

 Anecdotal evidence from her own field—academia—showed that in the weeks following the stay at home mandate in March, there was an upswing of around 20 to 30 percent of papers submitted to journals. However, the overwhelming majority of these were being authored by men.

Intrigued, Cui teamed up with Goizueta doctoral student Hao Ding and Feng Zhu from Harvard Business School to conduct a systematic study of female academics’ productivity and output during this period.

“We knew that the lockdown had disrupted life for everyone, including academics. With schools and kindergartens closed and people taking care of work and household obligations at home, we intuited that women would be affected more than men as they are disproportionately burdened with domestic and childcare duties,” Cui said. For female academics this would theoretically be particularly acute, as the critical thinking that goes into research calls for quiet, interruption-free environments.

 To put this to the test, Cui and her co-authors created a large data set covering all the new social science research papers produced by men and women, across 18 disciplines and submitted to SSRN, a research repository, between December 2018 to May 2019 and then from December 2019 to May 2020.

From this set, they were able to extract information on titles, authors’ names, affiliations, and addresses to identify their countries and institutions, as well as faculty pages to distinguish between men and women. In total they collected just under 43,000 papers written by more than 76,000 authors in 25 countries.

Looking at the data, Cui and her colleagues were able to compute the total number of papers produced by male and female academics each week and then compare the productivity of both before and after the start of the lockdown.

Prior to the pandemic, the 2019 period showed no significant changes in productivity in either gender. But in the 10 weeks following the shock of lockdown, a clear gap emerges between men and women, with female academics’ productivity falling by just under 14 percent in comparison to their male colleagues. Interestingly the effect was more pronounced in top-ranked research universities. This is likely because top schools require faculty to publish research as the primary requisite for promotion, so men would be motivated to continue authoring papers before and after the lockdown.

These findings lend solid, empirical clout to the notion that women do take a hit to productivity when care and work time are reorganized, Cui noted.

“We see clearly that women are producing less work as a consequence of working from home. In the field of academia, that has huge implications as achieving a permanent position, or tenure, is generally linked to your research output,” she said. “So, there is a serious fairness issue there. If women are producing less because the burden of household responsibility is greater for them than for men, then you’re likely to see fewer female academics get tenure through no fault of their own.” Indeed, one of the other findings of the study shows that while productivity fell, the quality of female-authored research measured by downloads and citations did not.

Then there’s the issue of teleworking and gender. With a significant proportion of the world’s white-collar organizations still working from home and unlikely to head back to the office any time soon—and as many schools and childcare facilities remain closed due to the pandemic—Cui is concerned that productivity as a measure of value and a marker of success might mean the odds are further stacked against women. And not just in academia.

“We looked at universities in particular, but our findings can really be externalized to any other industry because the underlying issues here are universal. So, with remote working becoming normalized, I think there’s a real onus on organizations of every type to think about how to mitigate these unintended consequences,” she said. “There needs to be more thought about how we measure value or potential of employees.”

Cui calls for organizations and institutions to consider these factors when they evaluate male and female workers in the present context and looking to the future. Among the kinds of proactive moves they might consider are to make training programs for male and female employees that explore fairness and encourage a more even distribution of responsibility in the home and for children.

“There’s nothing to be gained in prioritizing productivity as a tool for evaluation and just giving women more time, say, to produce as much,” Cui warned. “You’re just left with the same scenario of women doing more than their fair share. Solving this issue is really much more about being aware of it, getting educated about it, and changing your mindset.”

If you are a journalist looking to cover this research or speak with Professor Ciu about the subjects of telework and productivity, simply click on her icon now to arrange an interview today.



Lockdown teleworking impacts productivity of women more than men

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