Research Seminar: Sustainable Food Production and Consumption
How can operations research help to improve food production and consumption for the different actors involved as well as for overall sustainability?
On March 30, we had the pleasure to have Dan Iancu, Associate Professor of Operations, Information & Technology, Stanford Graduate School of Business, US, providing a comprehensive overview of managerial problems in food systems, from production to consumption. The seminar demonstrated how stylized mathematical modeling can lead to practical insights and implementable guidelines for relevant real-world problems in food systems.
The first part studied how firms or governments can design incentives that encourage local communities to protect forests. One key insight was that some collective incentive schemes can work even when monitoring individual farmers is difficult. Using field data from Indonesian palm oil farmers, the work demonstrated that moderate and well-targeted premiums to communities could prevent deforestation in many cases.
The second part focused on inventory management of premade food in grocery stores. The main, counterintuitive result was that (for endogenous shelf life) offering the freshest food item first (last-in-first-out) can reduce food waste while also improving profits.
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/dan-andrei-iancu