Speaker: Yulei LuoVenue: Room 530, Chengjun Building 7, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Using firm-level data, we document that inventory investment rises with contemporaneous sales shocks and falls with lagged sales shocks. This reversal pattern is inconsistent with standard rational-expectations stock-adjustment models, which imply weak or counterfactual inventory-sales comovement. We show that a simple extension with diagnostic expectations accounts for these dynamics. In the model, managers overweight representative demand signals, generating closed-form policy rules under which inventories initially overreact to sales shocks and subsequently reverse. Quantitatively, the model matches key moments of inventory dynamics, including the sign of inventory-sales comovement, the relative volatility of inventory investment to sales, and the persistence of inventory dynamics. These results identify belief distortions as a central force in inventory adjustment and provide a behavioral explanation for both longstanding and new puzzles in inventory dynamics.

Speaker: Jingyu ZhangVenue: Room 530, Chengjun Building 7, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Serving on the official unsecured creditors’ committee (UCC) of a bankrupt firm provides hedge funds with access to material nonpublic information (MNPI), which can facilitate their informed trading across firms and asset markets. We find that hedge funds increase equity turnover and execute more large trades in the quarters following UCC membership. In contrast, hedge funds do not exhibit such trading behavior after accessing public information about bankrupt firms or holding the bankrupt firm’s debt without committee involvement. Importantly, these large trades often target firms with close economic ties to the bankrupt entity. Returns fm these MNPI-driven trades are substantial.

Speaker: Sven HirschVenue: Room 204, Haina Building 2, Zijingang CampusAbstract: We analyze the causal type of both Killing vector fields and Killing spinors. As an application we give a proof of Bartnik's stationary vacuum conjecture from 1989 and geometrically characterize Siklos wave spacetimes. This talk is based on joint work with Lan-Hsuan Huang and Yiyue Zhang.

Speaker: Geoffrey SmithVenue: Lecture Hall, Floor 1, School of Medicine, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Professor Geoffrey Smith earned his PhD in 1981 at the laboratory of Alan Hay at the National Institute for Medical Research, London, UK (the predecessor of the Francis Crick Institute), focusing on the replication mechanism of influenza virus. Between 1981 and 1984, he conducted postdoctoral research at the laboratory of Bernard Moss at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States. During this period, he pioneered the development of recombinant vaccine technology using vaccinia virus (the smallpox vaccine) as a vector, proposing the original theory of using genetic engineering to modify viruses as recombinant vaccines. This principle has since been widely applied to the development of vaccines against various viruses and microorganisms. Professor Smith was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003 and a Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2011.Professor Smith has served as Professor of Pathogen Microbiology at the University of Oxford, Head of the Department of Virology at Imperial College London, and Head of the Division of Pathology at the University of Cambridge. In 2023, he returned to the Centre for Molecular Pathology at the University of Oxford to continue his research. In 2025, he joined the Shanghai Institute of Immunity and Infection, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He currently serves as Chief Scientist of the Vaccine Research Center at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and is Emeritus Professor at the Centre for Molecular Pathology, University of Oxford. His team’s main research directions include the interaction between poxviruses and host cells, the development of novel vaccines, and oncolytic viruses.

Speaker: Michael BarnettVenue: Room 901, Department of Public Affairs, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Global governance was first coined in the early and optimistic days following the end of the Cold War. Capitalizing on an ending to the Cold War no one expected, the international community experienced thoughts of new beginnings and possibilities. Confrontation and fear would now yield to cooperation and optimism. The world began building and expanding existing multilateral organizations to produce not only mutual gains but also a sense of global community. Around the turn of the century, though world order began to darken and notions of progress began to replace precarity. The drivers of the new worldview has led to a new round of global governance defined by precarity, uncertainty, and risk. What kinds of global institutions can and will be built in this new world order?

Speaker: Dr. Jeremy ArolesVenue: Room A723, School of Management Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Organizations in nascent categories face a distinctive legitimation challenge as they must establish temporal credibility – a persuasive account of where they came from and where they are going – when both the organisational past and the sector’s direction are unsettled. Existing research on uses of the past has primarily examined organisations with rich temporal resources; we know less about how temporal legitimation works when the past itself must be constructed rather than curated. We ask: How do actors in nascent organisational categories construct temporal legitimacy when the temporal resources available to them are scarce? We address this question through a qualitative study of coworking spaces across four global cities, through which we identify five temporal legitimation strategies operating under two interdependent mechanisms: constructing temporal ground (manufacturing a credible past) and claiming temporal trajectory (naturalising a credible future). We theorise these as forming an iterative cycle in which constructed depth makes trajectory claims credible, while projected futures redefine which pasts are usable. We contribute to research on legitimation in nascent categories by theorising temporal legitimation as a distinct mechanism of category construction, and to the uses-of-the-past literature by showing how temporal work operates under conditions of historical scarcity.

Speaker: Max M. LouwerseVenue: Room 415, Haina Building 3, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Opportunities and threats of AI are abundant: “AI might be as smart as humans”, “Artificial General Intelligence is projected to occur in 2026”. But how intelligent is AI really, and how do we compare it to human intelligence? Why does it seem common to compare AI with human intelligence, but is it awkward and questionable to compare your intelligence with the intelligence of somebody else? This presentation argues that AI and psychology are heavily intertwined historically, terminologically and conceptually. It shows evidence for this both theoretically and practically in a range of research projects. It will take you on a journey of AI that turns out to be different than the one often portrayed in the media. One that covers intelligence, misconceptions, and pigeons. 

Speaker: Minseok ChoiVenue: Room 102, Haina Building 2, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Scientific Machine Learning (SML) is rapidly emerging as a powerful paradigm for addressing complex problems in science and engineering by integrating machine learning with real-world data and the fundamental laws of physics. This talk will provide a concise overview of the core concepts and algorithmic foundations of SML. In particular, it will introduce methodologies such as Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), which incorporate physical constraints directly into the learning process, and Operator Learning, which seeks to learn mappings between function spaces and thereby enables fast and efficient prediction of system responses under varying input conditions. The talk will also discuss recent developments aimed at overcoming key limitations of early PINN and operator learning approaches, including issues of long-time integration, data efficiency, generalization, and computational stability. Finally, several examples will be presented to illustrate how SML can lead to innovative and effective solutions in practical applications, often providing substantial speed-ups over traditional numerical simulations.

Speaker:Nanxi ZhangVenue: Room 426, School of Economics Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: "Hidden City Ticketing" (HCT) is a strategy where customers book flights with layovers at their intended destinations and skip the final leg of the journey. Empirical studies on airfare data have shown that HCT chances are very prevalent (about 15%-25%) in airline pricing. In this paper, we investigate the impact of HCT on airline revenue and discuss if the airline should eliminate all HCT chances from its price to achieve higher profit. We use a choice-based network revenue management model to characterize the airline’s dynamic pricing problem. As airlines may penalize customers who purchase HCT by canceling frequent flyer miles and banning future travel with the airline, we capture customers’ concerns about the risks of HCT through a choice model. Our analysis shows that adjusting prices to completely eliminate HCT chances may overly constrain the pricing strategy, and it harms the airline revenue more than customers’ HCT purchase behavior. Furthermore, the impact of HCT is two-sided: While HCT can erode the airline’s revenue, it can also boost revenue in some cases. In the worst case, if customers purchase HCT, the airline’s revenue can be half of what it would be if customers don’t purchase HCT. In the best case, the airline’s revenue in the case customers purchase HCT can be twice that of the case where customers do not purchase HCT. Furthermore, the worst-case and best-case revenue bounds are both tight.