About

Seungjin Whang is the Jagdeep and Roshni Singh Professor of Operations, Information & Technology, Emeritus at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He obtained a bachelor of engineering at Seoul National University in Korea in 1974, and completed his graduate studies at the University of Rochester, earning a master of arts in 1983, a master of science in 1985, and a PhD in 1988. He has been a faculty member at Stanford Business School since 1987. His research interests include supply chain management and the economics of information systems. He has published extensively in academic journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, and Information Systems Research, with notable contributions including influential papers on the bullwhip effect in supply chains and pricing strategies in queueing systems. Whang has also addressed issues related to demand information distortion, secondary markets, and dynamic pricing under demand uncertainty. He has served as a senior editor for Information Systems Research and teaches courses in Supply Chain Management, developing case studies on various global companies. Outside academia, he serves on advisory boards for Altos Ventures and Gilead Sciences and co-directs the Stanford-NUS Executive Program in International Management.

Research topics

• Business
• Computer science
• Industrial organization
• Microeconomics
• Economics

Selected publications

• The Whose, Where and How of Inventory Control Design

  GSB Preserve · 2024-04-11 · 24 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Subtitle: Most companies have more freedom than they imagine to organize their supply chains for maximum efficiency. By rethinking inventory control in terms of who owns the inventory at any point, where it should be located, and who controls it, managers can develop supply chains that ensure much stronger alignment between their companies and their trading partners.

  PublisherDOI

• Operations Management Research and Teaching in Sustainability: Three Styles

  Springer series in supply chain management · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Digitization and profitability

  Information Systems and e-Business Management · 2019-11-14 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Consider a monopolistic vendor who faces a known demand curve. By setting a price that equates marginal revenue with marginal cost, the vendor will maximize his profit. This logic holds true of both physical and digital goods. But since digitization will lower the variable production cost, it will strictly increase the profit to the vendor. Then, can we conclude that digitization always improves the vendor’s profitability? Not necessarily. Now consider what will happen on the next day of the sales. Facing deterministic demand, the physical goods vendor must have prepared the exact quantity of the product to sell, and thus all products are sold out. By contrast, the digital goods vendor will have no stock out, thanks to the nature of the digital good. Therefore, the rational vendor will try to sell more and achieve a higher profit after the sales date. To this end, the vendor will now lower the price to attract additional customers with lower reservation prices. The process will indefinitely continue. Knowing this would happen, customers will wait for the price reduction. Even the customers who would have purchased on the first day would defer the purchase until price gets lower. The digital goods vendor will anticipate this and accordingly lower the price on the first day and later, thereby compromising his profitability. Note that this downward spiral takes place as a result of digitization. Thus, digitization may not necessarily improve the profitability to the vendor. We develop an economic model to formally analyze the impact of digitization on the profitability to the vendor.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Bullwhip Effect in HPs Supply Chain

  LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) · 2016-07-25

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  Publisher

• Markdown Competition

  International series in management science/operations research/International series in operations research & management science · 2015-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The bullwhip effect in supply chains

  IEEE Engineering Management Review · 2015-06-01 · 893 citations

  articleSenior author

  This publication contains reprint articles for which IEEE does not hold copyright. Full text is not available on IEEE Xplore for these articles.

  PublisherDOI

• Demand Uncertainty and the Bayesian Effect in Markdown Pricing with Strategic Customers

  Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2014-10-09 · 36 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper studies the role of demand uncertainty in temporal discrimination when the retailer applies markdown pricing facing strategic customers. We consider a model in which a retail firm announces a pair of declining prices for two selling periods, and customers with heterogeneous valuations each decide whether to buy a unit early, later or never. In this model, if the demand function is linear and its parameters are common knowledge, there never exist any markdown prices that achieve temporal discrimination for any feasible model parameters. Either all buying customers wait, or all buy early. By contrast, if the demand level is unknown, there always exists a temporally discriminating markdown pricing scheme for all feasible model parameters. We derive qualitative insights to the way demand uncertainty and Bayesian updating contribute to temporal discrimination, which broadly apply to nonlinear demand functions as well. We also show that in case of demand uncertainty, there always exists a temporally discriminating pricing scheme that yields a strictly higher profit to the retailer than the optimal static pricing scheme. Ironically, however, the retailer cannot implement the optimal scheme due to the same demand uncertainty.

  PublisherDOI

• Applications of Game Theory in Operation Management and Information Systems

  International series in management science/operations research/International series in operations research & management science · 2013-05-13 · 2 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• 1-E-3 戦略的な消費者に対する生産方式(ゲーム理論)

  日本オペレーションズ・リサーチ学会春季研究発表会アブストラクト集 · 2013-03-05

  article
  Publisher

• Codiffusion of Wireless Voice and Data Services: An Empirical Analysis of the Japanese Mobile Telecommunications Market

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2012-01-01 · 19 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Wireless telecommunications have become over time a ubiquitous tool that not only sustains our increasing need for flexibility and efficiency, but also provides new ways to access and experience both utilitarian and hedonic information goods and services. This paper explores the parallel market evolution of the two main categories of wireless services - voice and data - in leading technology markets, inspecting the differences and complex interactions between the associated adoption processes. We propose a model that addresses specific individual characteristics of these two services and the stand-alone/add-on relationship between them. In particular, we acknowledge the distinction between the nonoverlapping classes of basic consumers, who only subscribe to voice plans, and sophisticated consumers, who adopt both services. We also account for the fact that, unlike voice services, data services rapidly evolved over time due to factors such as interface improvement, gradual technological advances in data transmission speed and security, and the increase in volume and diversity of the content and services ported to mobile Internet. Moreover, we consider the time gap between the market introduction of these services and allow for different corresponding consumer learning curves. We test our model on the Japanese wireless market. The empirical analysis reveals several interesting results. In addition to an expected one-way effect of voice on data adoption at the market potential level, we do find two-way codiffusion effects at the speed of adoption level. We also observe that basic consumers impact the adoption of wireless voice services in a stronger way compared to sophisticated consumers. This, in turn, leads to a decreasing average marginal network effect of voice subscribers on the adoption of wireless voice services. Furthermore, we find that the willingness of voice consumers to consider adopting data services is positively related to both time and penetration of 3G-capable handsets among voice subscribers.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Hau L. Lee

  Stanford University

  25 shared

• Vineet Padmanabhan

  10 shared

• Yasushi Masuda

  Keio University

  4 shared

• Marius Florin Niculescu

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  4 shared

• Terry A. Taylor

  3 shared

• M. Eric Johnson

  3 shared

• Lode Li

  Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business

  3 shared

• H.L. Lee

  Stanford University

  2 shared

Education

• PhD, Simon School of Business Administration

  University of Rochester

  1988

Awards & honors

• Two-page laudatio in honor of his research, The Production a…
• Finmeccanica Faculty Scholar, 1994-1996, 1996
• Bob and Marilyn Jaedicke Faculty Scholar for 1991-1992, 1992
• Fletcher Jones Faculty Scholar for 1989-1990, 1990
• IBM Research Award, 1986