Manufacturing-as-a-Service: Bringing Job Opportunities to the Base of the Pyramid
29 Nov 2024
15:00 -16:30
Times are shown in local time.
Open to: All
Castle Teaching Room (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Operations and Technology Management seminar
Speaker: Dr Gökçe Esenduran, Daniels School of Business, Purdue University
About the seminar topic
We introduce and analyse the Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS) concept designed to improve welfare and address the employment scarcity at the base of the pyramid. Inspired by Project Saksham, an initiative in India that brings mobile manufacturing units – called Factories on Wheels (FOWs) – to low-income communities, the MaaS concept allows community members to form labor firms, rent FOWs, and produce goods with market access provided by a social planner.
We compare 2 operating policies:
- an autonomous setting, where the FOW owner sets rental prices and labor firms decide on rental duration and employee wages
- a centralised setting, where the social planner makes decisions to maximise total welfare, including employee surplus and firm profits
As a result, we build a stylised model of the MaaS framework and analyse the equilibrium outcomes under autonomous and centralised settings. We find that, counterintuitively, the centralised setting may lead to a higher total firm profit than the autonomous setting, while the autonomous setting may lead to a higher employee wage and surplus.
We find that while total welfare is always higher in the centralised setting, the autonomous setting can achieve optimal welfare under certain conditions. Strategies like adding more labour firms, increasing labour productivity, or reducing employee inconvenience can help reduce the welfare gap when the autonomous setting underperforms.
However, the centralised setting may have drawbacks, too, such as potentially lower overall employment levels compared to the autonomous setting. Overall, our results highlight the trade-offs between welfare maximisation, employment growth, and operational autonomy, providing valuable guidance for social planners in designing an effective MaaS framework.
(Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4958998)
Speaker bio
Dr Gökçe Esenduran is an associate professor of management at Daniels School of Business, Purdue University. She received her PhD from Kenan-Flagler Business School, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before joining Purdue, she was an associate professor at The Ohio State University.
Gökçe’s current research primarily focuses on environmentally and socially responsible operations, product returns, circular economy, and environmental regulations. She also studies the environmental impacts of emerging business models, such as platform-based services. Her work integrates regulatory, social, and environmental perspectives to explore how businesses can align profitability with sustainable practices. She has published in journals such as Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, and Journal of Operations Management.
She received the Krannert Young Faculty Scholar Award in 2019. She is a senior editor for Production and Operations Management and associate editor for Manufacturing & Service Operations Management and Decision Sciences Journal.
In the past, she served as the treasurer of Women in OR/MS, as the secretary, president, and past president of POMS College of Sustainable Operations, and as the chair of M&SOM Sustainable Operations SIG. Currently, she is serving as the secretary/treasurer of the M&SOM Society Board and on INFORMS Magazine Editorial Advisory Board.
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Khanti Tsui.