Monday
Yunan Ji – Georgetown University
The Hidden Costs of Health Care Cost-Cutting
Yunan Ji is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business. Her research focuses on the design and regulation of health care markets and has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of the American Medical Association, among others. Ji is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Research Associate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and has received research grants from the National Institute of Health (NIH). Ji received her Ph.D. in Health Policy and Economics from Harvard University in 2022 and her B.A. in Mathematics and Economics from Brown University in 2014.
Tuesday
Vishal Agrawal – Georgetown University
Designing Better Clothing Take-Back Programs
Vishal Agrawal is Henry J. Blommer Family Endowed Chair in Sustainable Business, Professor of Operations and Information Management, and Academic Director, Business of Sustainability Initiative at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. His research interests and expertise extend across a variety of topics related to the role of businesses in addressing sustainability challenges such as circular economy, business model innovation, renewable energy, product development, supply chain sustainability and consumer behavior. His research has appeared in leading journals such as Management Science and M&SOM, and he has received several awards including the 2023 MSOM Young Scholar Prize, which recognizes exceptional young researchers (of age 40 years or younger) who have made outstanding contributions to scholarship in operations management.
Wednesday
Ziwei Cong – Georgetown University
The Impact of Freemium Models on Content Creators and Platforms
Ziwei Cong is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University. Her research employs econometrics and machine learning methods to investigate the designs of digital platforms (e.g., recommendation algorithms and business models) and the decision-making processes of content creators and influencers. Ziwei has received several awards for her research, including the 2021 Vithala R. and Saroj V. Rao ISMS Doctoral Dissertation Award (winner), the 2020 Shankar-Spiegel Dissertation Proposal Award (runner-up), and the finalist of the 2020 Best Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Competition at the American Statistics Association (Marketing Section).
Thursday
Francesco D’Acunto – Georgetown University
Can Algorithms Eliminate Implicit Biases in Financial Decisions?
Francesco D’Acunto is the A. James Clark Chair in Global Real Estate and Provost Distinguished Associate Professor of Finance at Georgetown University. His research interests are in the areas of households’ beliefs and economic choices, housing and real estate, FinTech and inequalities. In these areas, Professor D’Acunto studies the formation of beliefs and the financial decision-making of households, how regulation and the financial sector affect inequalities and discrimination through mortgage lending, and how FinTech can reduce these inequalities. His work has been published in top academic journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economic Studies, and others. His work has been awarded two Cubist Systematic Strategies Awards for Outstanding Research and has been covered in the policy speeches of top global policymakers, such as the President of the European Central Bank and those of the New York Fed, San Francisco Fed, and Cleveland Fed.
Friday
Lizhu Liu – Georgetown University
The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China
Lizhi Liu is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and the author of the award-winning book From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-commerce in China (Princeton University Press, 2024). Her research on the politics of trade and technology has earned multiple awards and funding from prestigious institutions, including the Gates Foundation. Her work has been featured in Bloomberg, WIRED, the WIRE China, and the South China Morning Post. Notably, her book was recognized by the China-Britain Business Council as one of the “Best Books on China of 2024” and won a silver medal in the 2025 Axiom Business Book Awards (International Business/Globalization category), in addition to receiving two prestigious dissertation awards for its earlier draft.
