Join us once a month throughout the academic year for our IMI Research Brown Bag Series.
Every month we will feature an IMI faculty member or guest speaker to hold an informal seminar on their research and other topics of discussion.
Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunch as sessions take place between 12 pm and 1 pm.
Open to everyone!
Upcoming Brown Bags:
Thursday, December 5 - Michael Marin
KN 2213
The Impact of Mandatory Sales Tax Compliance on Foreign Digital Economy Business
This paper investigates the impact of mandatory sales tax collection by foreign digital platforms. Using new goods and services tax (GST) rules on digital sales in Canada, enacted in July 2021 in accordance with the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Action 1, we explore how digital platforms influence pricing strategies for both small suppliers and foreign operators. Our analysis shows that online vendors previously exempt from GST decrease their prices relative to those unaffected by the legislative change. Additionally, we find that these price reductions are more pronounced in local markets with highly elastic demand where consumers have more substitutes and vendors are under greater pressure to remain competitive. This study highlights the critical role that digital platforms play in streamlining tax compliance and shaping market dynamics. The results provide valuable insights for policymakers considering similar digital platform-based taxation reforms in the ever-evolving digital economy.
Past Brown Bags
Thursday, October 17 - Tara Vinodrai
Remote work: urban panacea or curse?
The onset of the global Covid-19 accelerated the shift to remote and hybrid work prompting speculation about the future of work and cities. In this presentation, Dr. Tara Vinodrai will share findings from her collaborative work with Dr. Shauna Brail based on their recently published report, Remote Work: Urban Panacea or Curse. Marshalling evidence from expert interviews, and quantitative data from traditional and novel data sources, they document overall patterns associated with the shift to remote and hybrid work, including the impacts on equity-deserving groups, productivity and innovation, and the urban built environment. You can read the report here, as well as their piece in The Conversation.
Thursday, November 7 - Ningyuan Chen
Dynamic Pricing and Multi-armed Bandit
In this talk, we will introduce two research topics in Operations Research. Dynamic pricing is the practice of charging consumers different prices over time based on a number of factors such as remaining capacity and seasonality. We will talk about the reasons why companies use dynamic pricing, the mathematical formulation and its implication on consumer welfare. Multi-armed bandit is a sequential decision-making framework that has been widely used in reinforcement learning and real-world business. The key feature is the exploration/exploitation trade-off. We will introduce some policies that perform well.