Person: Drake, David Francis
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Drake
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David Francis
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Drake, David Francis
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Publication Mobile Money: The Effect of Service Quality and Competition on Demand(2015-01-29) Balasubramanian, Karthik; Drake, David FrancisThe use of electronic money transfer through cellular networks (“mobile money") is rapidly increasing in the developing world. The resulting electronic currency ecosystem could improve the lives of the estimated 2 billion people who live on less than $2 a day by facilitating more secure, accessible, and reliable ways to store and transfer money than are currently available. The development of this ecosystem requires a network of agents to conduct cash-for-electronic value transactions and vice versa. This paper estimates the effect of competition and service quality on mobile money demand. In this setting, service quality consists of service reliability (lower stockout and system downtime rates), pricing transparency, and agent expertise. Among our results, we find that agents experience reduced demand for service failures due to stockouts, but not for service failures due to network downtime, suggesting that consumers differentially ascribe responsibility for service failure based on the type of failure they experience. We find that both stockout rate and agent expertise are important competitive dimensions in this setting. Pricing transparency, on the other hand, has a main effect on demand but has no significant interaction with competitive intensity. This paper furthers our understanding of the impact and interaction of quality and competition in service settings, while developing a foundation for the exploration of mobile money by OM scholars.Publication Technology Choice and Capacity Portfolios under Emissions Regulation(2016) Drake, David Francis; Kleindorfer, Paul R.; Van Wassenhove, Luk N.We study the impact of emissions tax and emissions cap-and-trade regulation on a firm's technology choice and capacity decisions. We show that emissions price uncertainty under cap-and-trade results in greater expected profit than a constant emissions price under an emissions tax, which contradicts popular arguments that the greater uncertainty under cap-and-trade will erode value. We further show that two operational drivers underlie this result: i) the firm's option not to operate, which effectively right-censors the uncertain emissions price and ii) dispatch flexibility, which is the firm's ability to first deploy its most profitable capacity given the realized emissions price. In addition to these managerial insights, we also explore the effect of investment and production subsidies. Through an illustrative example, we show that production subsidies of higher investment and production cost technologies (such as carbon capture and storage technologies) have no effect on the firm's optimal total capacity when firms own a portfolio of both clean and dirty technologies. On the other hand, investment subsidies of these technologies increase the firm's total capacity, conditionally increasing expected emissions. Subsidization of a lower production cost technology has no effect on the firm's optimal total capacity in multi-technology portfolios.Publication Inventory Management for Mobile Money Agents in the Developing World(2017-06-28) Balasubramanian, Karthik; Drake, David Francis; Fearing, DouglasMobile money systems, platforms built and managed by mobile network operators to allow money to be stored as digital currency, have burgeoned in the developing world as a mechanism to transfer money electronically. Mobile money agents exchange cash for electronic value and vice versa, forming the backbone of an emerging electronic currency ecosystem that has potential to connect millions of poor and “unbanked" people to the formal financial system. Unfortunately, low service levels due to agent inventory management are a major impediment to the further development of these ecosystems. This paper describes models for the agent's inventory problem, unique in that sales of electronic value (cash) correspond to an equivalent increase in inventory of cash (electronic value). This paper presents a base inventory model and an analytical heuristic that are used to determine optimal stocking levels for cash and electronic value given an agent's historical demand. When tested with a large sample of transaction-level data provided by an East African mobile operator, both the base model and the heuristic improved agent profitability by reducing inventory costs (defined here as the sum of stockout losses and cost of capital associated with holding inventory). The heuristic increased estimated agent profits by 15% relative to profits realized through agents actual decisions, while also offering substantial computational advantages relative to the base model.Publication Observation Bias: The Impact of Demand Censoring on Newsvendor Level and Adjustment Behavior(INFORMS, 2014) Rudi, Nils; Drake, David FrancisIn an experimental newsvendor setting we investigate three phenomena: level behavior—the decision-maker's average ordering tendency; adjustment behavior—the tendency to adjust period-to-period order quantities; and observation bias—the tendency to let the degree of demand feedback influence order quantities. We find that the portion of mismatch cost due to adjustment behavior exceeds the portion of mismatch cost due to level behavior in three out of four conditions. Observation bias is studied through censored demand feedback, a situation which arguably represents the majority of newsvendor settings. When demands are uncensored, subjects tend to order below the normative quantity when facing high margin and above the normative quantity when facing low margin, but in neither case beyond mean demand (a.k.a. the pull-to-center effect). Censoring in general leads to lower quantities, magnifying the below-normative level behavior when facing high margin but partially counterbalancing the above-normative level behavior when facing low margin, violating the pull-to-center effect in both cases.Publication Sustainable Operations Management: An Enduring Stream or a Passing Fancy?(2013) Drake, David Francis; Spinler, StefanPaul Kleindorfer was among the first to weigh in on and nurture the stream of Sustainable Operations Management. The thoughts laid out here are based on conversations we had with Paul relating to the drivers underlying sustainability as a management issue: population and per capita consumption growth, the limited nature of resources and sinks, and the responsibility and exposure of firms to ensuing ecological risks and costs. We then discuss how an operations management lens contributes to the issue and criteria to help the Sustainable Operations Management perspective endure. This article relates to a presentation delivered by Morris Cohen for Paul's Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Distinguished Fellows Award, given at Columbia University, June 18, 2012. We wrote this article at Paul's request.Publication Carbon Tariffs: Effects in Settings with Technology Choice and Foreign Comparative Advantage(2012-09-04) Drake, David FrancisCarbon regulation is intended to reduce global emissions, but there is growing concern that such regulation may simply shift production to unregulated regions and increase global emissions in the process. Carbon tariffs have emerged as a possible mechanism to address these concerns by imposing carbon costs on imports at the regulated region's border. I show that, when firms choose from discrete production technologies and offshore producers hold a comparative cost advantage, carbon leakage can result despite the implementation of a carbon tariff. In such a setting, foreign firms adopt clean technology at a lower emissions price than firms operating in the regulated region, with foreign entry increasing only over emissions price intervals within which foreign firms hold this technology advantage. Further, domestic firms are shown to conditionally offshore production despite the implementation of a carbon tariff, adopting cleaner technology when they do so. As a consequence, when carbon leakage does occur under a carbon tariff, it conditionally decreases global emissions. Three sources of potential welfare improvement realized through carbon tariffs require both foreign comparative advantage and endogenous technology choice, underscoring the importance of considering both in value assessments of such a policy.