IMI Research Brown Bag Series

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, March 27 - Ruben Gaetani
KN 2213

The Decline in the Transmission of Scientific Ideas (with Enrico Berkes)

For the social value of science to be fully realized, ideas must diffuse and be applied beyond the narrow boundaries of their original field. Yet, little is known about what determines the breadth of adoption and how it has changed over time. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive empirical evidence that the diffusion of new scientific ideas has narrowed significantly over the past four decades. We show that increasing specialization in scientific language has played a key role in this trend, with research using more technical terminology diffusing less widely. To interpret these findings, we propose a simple theory in which the accessibility of ideas evolves endogenously with the innovation landscape. As advancing the knowledge frontier requires increasingly complex research, scientists tend to favor specialized language, limiting diffusion. Policy interventions that realign incentives can broaden diffusion and increase the social value of scientific research.

Thursday, May 1 - Yinnon Geva
KN 2213

Real Estate for Social Purpose: Varieties of Entrepreneurialism in Toronto’s Non-Profit Housing Sector

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.

Thursday, December 5 - Michael Marin

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.