Meet our Post-Doctoral Scholars

MEET POST-DOCTORAL SCHOLAR MEYSAM FEREIDOUNI, PH.D.

Meysam Fereidouni, Ph.D, graduated from the BTMA graduate program in August 2023 and began a Post-Doctoral Scholar Program under the supervision of Professor Barrie R. Nault in September 2023. His dissertation entitled “Benefits and Drawbacks of Digital Platforms with Policy Analysis” can be found here. Fereidouni and co-author, BTMA Assistant Professor Vaarun Vijairaghavan, presented their joint work, “Collaborative Strategies to Fight Digital Piracy: Incentivizing ISPs through Revenue Sharing” at 2023 International Conference on Information Systems. 

In July 2024, Fereidouni will start his academic appointment as an Assistant Professor at Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University.

How has the BTMA Ph.D. program influenced your overall research goals?

I have been in the BTMA program for more than five years, and I can tell it has been designed meticulously. The journey was challenging, but I would choose the same path if I could go back in time. The more effort you put in, the more support and trust you will get from the program—these two factors gave me confidence in what I do. 

The program provides financial support and encourages young scholars to attend relevant workshops and conferences. For instance, although I could not present my own work at the TEIS conference, my supervisor covered the cost of attending this conference in 2019. This was a fabulous experience as I met many well-known scholars in the economics of IS, and it exposed me to cutting-edge research opportunities. 

Another aspect that sets the BTMA program apart is its commitment to academic excellence. The program regularly invites esteemed guest speakers to campus, providing a unique opportunity to engage with them individually. This has been instrumental in validating my progress and affirming that I'm on the right track. 

What is your current research about?

I am working on four projects, three of them were part of my Ph.D. thesis, and the fourth was started during my post-doctoral position. Overall, my research can be classified into two streams: the economics of digital platforms and digital piracy.

Focusing on platforms offering exclusive services to their customers, my first research project explains why platforms like ShopRunner and Amazon have kept their membership fees reasonably constant over the last few years despite a massive increase in shipping costs. My second research project shows how policymakers can mitigate the negative impacts of biased intermediation by platforms on society using tax instruments. 

And my third and fourth research projects focus on the long-standing problem of digital piracy. Unlike prior research in the literature, our findings indicate that policymakers can improve social welfare by imposing fines on detected pirates and we also find solutions that don’t require policy intervention, whereby content providers offer financial incentives to Internet service providers for identifying consumers of pirated content.

In your Economics of Digital Platforms research stream, what role does competition play in a ‘shared platform’?

In a “shared platform”, like Amazon’s marketplace or ShopRunner, retailers join the same platform and form a horizontal alliance instead of introducing their own platform to outperform competitors. These platforms have offered many opportunities for small businesses to overcome the challenges of expanding their user base by allowing them to reach a wide range of customers. Our results indicate that reducing the fixed entry charge can motivate all retailers to join. More importantly, we show that to cover the costs of investment in exclusive services, like free shipping, the platform cannot subsidize the retailer-side of its marketplace. Depending on customers’ sensitivity to the platform’s investment in exclusive services and the membership fee, we show that when the social welfare decreases with the membership fee, a policymaker can negate this impact by incentivizing the platform to increase its investment in offering exclusive services to customers.

What is platform ‘biased intermediation’ and how does it impact consumers?

Biased intermediation is anti-competitive behavior, it is defined as a platforms' incentive to offer products or pricing matches that are more profitable to the platform rather than the most relevant products or pricing for the consumer.

The gatekeeping position of online platforms like Amazon, App Store, Google, or Meta, enables them to engage in potentially costly biased intermediation between content providers (CPs) that pay for prominence and consumers. For example, prior research show that Amazon prioritizes sellers that use the Fulfillment by Amazon services even if they are not objectively the best for consumers. We determine that neutrality regulations that remove bias may not improve social welfare. To counter the potential negative effects of biased intermediation on social welfare, we examine two alternative policy instruments: (i) imposing taxes on the platform’s revenue from prominence charges and (ii) imposing taxes on the platform’s total revenue. We find that although both instruments are effective in controlling the platform’s biased intermediation, prominence charge taxes have more favorable outcomes.

What role does policy have in mitigating costs of Digital Piracy?

For digital piracy, prior studies show that policymakers’ use of fines reduces social welfare. In this study, we show that this is not an accurate finding. The underlying assumption in prior studies is that the policymaker keeps the revenue gained from imposing fines on detected pirates. However, in practice, policymakers redistribute revenue from fines back to society. We show imposing fines on detected pirates can enhance social welfare when policymakers use collected fines either as subsidies to support legal purchases or as restitution to the firm. 

In another study, we focus on the role of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), like Telus or Rogers in Canada, in fighting digital piracy. Relying on ISPs, policymakers have centered antipiracy efforts on detecting pirates and distributors of illegal content. However, because illegal content contributes to a significant fraction of Internet traffic, ISPs do not have the incentive to fight digital piracy effectively. We show that a content provider (CP) can incentivize the ISP to increase enforcement efforts against digital piracy by voluntarily sharing a fraction of their revenue with ISPs. We find that the revenue sharing between the CP and the ISP can improve social welfare without policymakers’ intervention. 

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MEET POST-DOCORAL SCHOLAR JUN MA, PH.D.

Jun Ma, Ph.D., graduated from the Schulich School of Engineering graduate program in January 2021 with a Ph.D. in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. He began a Post-Doctoral Scholar Program in the Haskayne School of Business under the supervision of Professor Barrie R. Nault in February 2021. 

His dissertation entitled “Discrete Choice-based Equilibrium Modeling of Supply Chain Network with Conflicting Objectives and Demand Uncertainty”, can be found here. In 2023, he published co-authored research in the International Journal of Production Economics: Ma, J., Nault, B. R., & Tu, Y. P. (2023). Customer segmentation, pricing, and lead time decisions: A stochastic-user-equilibrium perspective. International Journal of Production Economics, 264, Doi: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2023.108985

In July 2024, Ma will start an academic appointment as Assistant Professor at MacEwan University in Edmonton in the Department of Decision Sciences in the School of Business.

How as the Haskayne Post-Doctoral program influenced your overall research goals?

The program has significantly influenced my research goals and shaped my academic trajectory in several profound ways. Firstly, the exposure to a diverse set of analytical tools and methodologies within the program has expanded my research methodology toolkit. Secondly, the program facilitated numerous collaborations with academics. These interactions have not only broadened my perspective but also led to co-authored papers. Additionally, the program has significantly boosted my confidence in my career path and ignited my passion for the field.

What are the top two novel contributions of your research and analytical approach as a Post-Doctoral Scholar?

1) Responsive supply chains rely on coordination between upstream and downstream firms where each face trade-offs between lead time and costs. We consider customers as heterogeneous and that firms do not have full information about their customers. Subsequently, we generalize supply chain network stochastic user equilibrium conditions in our analytical model as an equilibrium that is reached when no supply chain (or firm) believes that their profit can be improved by unilaterally changing its Price/Time menu. 

We find that under these modeling conditions, there is a unique equilibrium in the decentralized and centralized supply chain networks. We are the first published research team in our field to introduce the stochastic user equilibrium condition into a supply chain network.

2) As blockchain technology advances, blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) alliances have emerged in practice. We develop a general-form analytical model where members are engaged in a non-cooperative game. We consider a classical exclusivity agreement whereby members in the DAO alliance invest in efforts to recruit customers in their demand-side market. The matching algorithm provided by DAO alliances can allocate service to customers among members to improve performance from a broad perspective that is otherwise ignored when members act in their local interests. We derive the conditions under which the DAO volume is maximized under the coordination mechanisms and analyze the impact of the widely used coordination mechanisms, royalty, and transfer.

What is your current research stream?

I am working on the production planning and scheduling of mining supply chains now. Horizontal information sharing mechanisms in the mining supply chains under production cost uncertainty will be proposed to jointly enhance the benefits of both mining complexes and consumers.