2026年第48期(总第1192期)

演讲主题：Causal AI: application in last-mile and AI Search: evidence in Reddit

主讲人：崔若濛 Goizueta Business School, Emory University，Goizueta Foundation Term Chair Associate Professor

主持人：张意成 信息管理与数据科学系副教授

活动时间：2026年6月23日（周二）10:45-12:15

活动地址：管院大楼119教室

主讲人简介：

崔若濛现任埃默里大学戈伊苏埃塔商学院信息系统与运营管理系Goizueta Foundation Term Chair副教授，研究聚焦于平台、零售与供应链中的因果驱动决策。她的专业领域涵盖因果推断、因果机器学习、identify-then-optimize模型及经济学，重点探讨企业在数字化与人工智能转型过程中，如何通过运营战略创造并传递价值，以及数字化和AI如何重塑企业竞争与运营方式。她的研究成果发表于《Management Science》《Manufacturing & Service Operations Management》《Operations Research》《Production and Operations Management》《Harvard Business Review》等国际顶级期刊，并获得19项重要学术奖项，包括2022年POMS青年学者研究成就奖、2023年和2024年M&SOM最佳论文奖等。与此同时，她的研究也受到NPR、《金融时报》、Fox News、《财富》和《哈佛商业评论》等媒体广泛关注。崔若濛教授还曾为Amazon、阿里巴巴、京东、百事、腾讯、菜鸟、美团等多家领先企业提供咨询，并自2022年起担任亚马逊访问学者，参与设计和实施面向供应链与机器人决策的前沿因果推断、机器学习、优化与经济模型。

活动简介：

This talk presents two studies on causal AI in digital platforms and operations. In the first paper, “The Value of Last-Mile Delivery in Online Retail,” we examine the economic value of last-mile delivery, partnering with Cainiao, Alibaba’s logistics platform. Exploiting a quasi-experiment in which home delivery service was sequentially rolled out to pickup stations in 2021, a staggered difference-in-differences design reveals that home delivery significantly increases sales and customer spending on Alibaba’s retail platform. We further propose an operations-aware targeting framework that integrates causal machine learning with constrained optimization, and extend it with routing optimization, showing that the resulting policies significantly improve revenue performance.

In the second paper, “The Impact of AI Search on the Online Content Ecosystem: Evidence from Google and Reddit,” we examine how Google AI Overviews affects user engagement on Reddit. Our identification exploits Google’s content moderation policy: Safe-for-Work subreddits are surfaced in AI Overviews while Not-Safe-for-Work subreddits are excluded, providing a clean difference-in-differences design across 105,012 subreddits. Contrary to the prevailing narrative that AI search kills content platforms, we find that AI Overviews increases Reddit engagement. We develop a search-experience framework: for search-good content, AI summaries satisfy information needs directly, producing a replacement effect; for experience-good content, AI summaries cannot replicate the richness of human discussion and instead serve as a discovery channel that drives users to the platform.