Research profile: Jenny Chen

Dr. Chen is an internationally recognized scholar whose research focuses on the interface between marketing and operations, including topics such as pricing, customer returns, channel strategy and coopetition (collaboration with competitors). For example, Dr. Chen has studied how firms can mitigate the negative impacts of customer returns, and how they can design optimal methods to cope with them in the presence of competition. Money-back guarantees (MBGs) and personalized pricing strategies (PPS) work well for monopoly retailers, but not for companies in duopolies. The results of one of her published works imply that only early adopters benefit from PPS for the duopoly; MBG, on the other hand, seems to be a better strategy for competing retailers, as it can benefit at least one of them. This provides a convincing explanation of the popularity of the MBG customer returns policy.

In a second example, Dr. Chen examined customer perceptions of fairness with regard to returns policies in the presence of fraudulent returns, with the goal of creating better returns policies. Currently, Dr. Chen is working on understanding operations-related decision-making using analytical techniques such as statistics, data science and machine learning. She and her co-authors have developed a new strategy for detecting credit card fraud using incentives that encourage individuals and merchants to think about safety first. The results find that the strategy could increase profits and consumer surplus by about 10 percent, outperforming current fraud detection systems.