Shreyas Sekar
Shreyas Sekar

Shreyas Sekar

I am an Assistant Professor of Operations at the University of Toronto with appointments at the Rotman School of Management and the Department of Management, University of Toronto Scarborough. I am also a Faculty Affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.

Email: shreyas.sekar [at] rotman.utoronto.ca

Office: IC 371, University of Toronto Scarborough
RT 417, Rotman School of Management

Research Overview

My research focuses on the design and operation of online platforms, and in particular questions pertaining to revenue management and online recommendations. Much of my recent work is centered around the following broad themes:

  • Designing Platforms that are Robust to Online Fraud: How should platform designers guarantee good outcomes for consumers and service providers in the face of manipulation including fake reviews, fraudulent users, click bots, disintermediation, collusion, etc.?
  • New Pricing Models for the Digital Economy: What kind of innovative pricing strategies (e.g., subscriptions, revenue sharing, probabilistic selling) can we leverage in online marketplaces?

Prior to joining UofT, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Business School. In a previous life, I received my Ph.D in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where I received the Robert McNoughton award for best graduate dissertation. At RPI, I was fortunate to be advised by Elliot Anshelevich.

I was recently featured by The Logic magazine as one of the Top 8 `People to watch in Candian e-commerce'

What's New

  • Giving a talk on Product Rankings for Two-Sided Marketplaces (Oct 22, 2:15PM at Summit 335) and chairing a session on Education Analytics (Oct 21, 12:45PM at Summit 342) at INFORMS 2024
  • Our group is hiring for a tenure-track position with appointments at Rotman and UTSC.
  • New working paper "Pricing and Rarity Design of Blind Boxes with Random Items" out on SSRN (with Ming Hu and Taojie Qin)
  • Our paper "Platform Disintermediation: Information Effects and Pricing Remedies" has been accepted for presentation at the MSOM Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship (TIE) SIG Day, 2024.
  • Preliminary version of paper "Platform Disintermediation: Information Effects and Pricing Remedies" accepted for presentation at the ACM EC 2024 conference
  • Our paper "What is Best for Students, Numerical Scores or Letter Grades?" has been accepted for publication at the IJCAI 2024 conference

Recent Papers