Meghan Esson is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Tippie College of Business. Her presentation is titled, “Private Equity in Public-Provider Markets: Cost Efficiency vs. Cream-Skimming.” 

Abstract: We examine the cost-cutting strategies employed by private equity (PE) firms in markets where public firms also provide services. We use the ambulance industry as a laboratory as price and choice regulation limits other avenues of increasing profitability. We exploit the staggered acquisition...

Ela Seyedalikhani is a PhD student in Finance at the Tippie College of Business.

Zhaosong Lu is a Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Minnesota.

Title: First-Order Methods for Bilevel Optimization

Abstract: Bilevel optimization, also known as two-level optimization, is an important branch within mathematical optimization. It has found applications across various domains, including economics, logistics, supply chain,  transportation, engineering design, and machine learning. In this talk, we will present first-order methods...

Juan Ortner is an Associate Professor of Economics at Boston University.

Kristen Altenburger is a staff research scientist at Meta.

Title: Social Networks for Product Innovation

Abstract: Technological innovations have fundamentally transformed information flow and social behavior. As society’s digital platforms continue to promote instantaneous connectivity, network science can help advance machine learning and causal inference methods aimed at driving product innovation. This talk will first provide an overview of network science in machine learning applications...

R. Vijay Krishna is an Associate Professor of Economics at Florida State University.