运营优化系列讲座（2）——石铎

时间：2026-04-14

报告人：石铎 副教授

邀请人：朱晗 教授

报告题目：Online Retailing with Instant Return Credit

报告时间：2026年04月21日（周二）上午10:00-11:30

报告地点：劝学楼425室

主办单位：东北财经大学管理科学与工程学院
辽宁省大数据管理与优化决策重点实验室
辽宁省大数据管理决策研究生创新与学术交流中心

【报告摘要】

Many online retailers have recently adopted instant return credit (IRC)---offering a store credit immediately upon a return claim, without requiring the return to be received or verified. By improving consumers' temporary shopping budgets, IRC helps resolve the mismatches between products and consumer tastes and thus converts online returns into new sales. This process is, however, prone to costly fake returns from dishonest consumers. In this paper, we take the initiative to study IRC's fundamental dynamics and implications. We build a game theory model in which a retailer sells two horizontally differentiated products, facing consumers with heterogeneity in taste, budget level, and honesty type. We characterize the market risk condition using three factors: product cost, consumers' salvage value for a mismatched product, and proportion of dishonest consumers. In the base setting that the retailer offers IRC uniformly to all consumers, we identify three schemes to execute IRC: If the market risk is low, the retailer should offer partial IRC coupled with symmetric pricing; if the market risk is medium, the retailer should offer full IRC coupled with asymmetric pricing, although the two products are completely symmetric; if the market risk is high, IRC should not be offered. In the advanced setting that the retailer can distinguish between honest and dishonest consumers (e.g., with predictive analytics enabled by AI tools) and offer IRC contingently, full (partial or no) IRC should be offered to honest (dishonest) consumers; the retailer may still allow fake returns even when consumer types can be perfectly learned. We further demonstrate that uniform IRC is more valuable for low-risk markets, while making IRC contingent on consumer type is more valuable for medium-risk markets. Finally, uniform IRC may hurt both types of consumers for low-cost products, while making IRC contingent normally rewards honest consumers and penalizes dishonest consumers.

【报告人简介】

石铎，香港中文大学（深圳）经管学院长聘副教授。他于2018年在圣路易斯华盛顿大学奥林商学院获得博士学位。此前，他毕业于中国科学技术大学华罗庚数学英才班，本科期间曾在中国科学院数学与系统科学研究院访问学习一年。石铎以解析模型研究企业与政府机构面临的运营问题，近期研究方向包括工业4.0运营策略、食品与农业供应链、运营中的ESG、内容运营及零售运营。他的研究成果发表于《Management Science》《Manufacturing & Service Operations Management》《Production and Operations Management》，长期担任上述期刊审稿人，同时是POM期刊编委。在香港中文大学（深圳），石铎曾获2021年经管学院科研奖、2022年经管学院本科教学奖及2023年校长模范教学奖；论文在多个主流学术会议获奖，其中包括指导学生获得的学生论文竞赛奖项。此外，他主持两项国家自然科学基金项目。

撰稿：赵永丽 朱晗      审核 ：吴志樵  印明鹤        单位：管理科学与工程学院