Erick Li

PhD PSU, MCom UNSW, BE SJTU
Senior Lecturer
erick.li@sydney.edu.au

Room 490
H04 - Merewether Building
The University of Sydney
NSW 2006 Australia

Phone: +61 2 9114 0751
Fax: +61 2 9351 6409

Erick (Zhaolin) Li received a Ph.D. in Business Administration from The Pennsylvania State University, a Master of Commerce in Accounting from The University of New South Wales, and a Bachelor of Engineering in Materials Science & Industrial Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Dr. Li has been with The University of Sydney since January 2009 and is currently a Senior Lecturer. Before moving to Sydney, he had worked in Ernst & Young LLP, Southern Arkansas University, and City University of Hong Kong.

His research interests spans two areas of interest: the stochastic optimization in supply chains, and supply chain integration. His stochastic optimization research has considered the impact of technology obsolescence, supply interruptions, consumer preferences, and chain-to-chain competition on the firm's operational strategies. His research on supply chain integration has examined and identified not only the benefit of integration but also the cost of integration, which was largely left out in extant literatures. His research has appeared in Management Science and Production and Operations Management.

He completed two early research projects on supply interruption and product rollover, respectively. His research on supply interruption, which is one of the most significant risks in supply chains, prescribed optimal uses of upstream information, downstream inventory buffers, and incentive compatible contracts to mitigate the adverse impact of supply interruptions. His research on product rollover characterized the policy that jointly optimizes product configuration and inventory buffers, and the coordination mechanism to achieve Pareto improvement in supply chains with short product life cycle and declining prices.

While his early research mainly focused on the benefit of supply chain integration, his newest research revealed some important cost of supply chain integration. He found that due to ex post opportunism the downstream firm in a non-integrated chain could acquire and disclose more information to external investors and upstream partners than the counter-part in an integrated chain. In other words, supply chain integration could inflict a cost of integration upon external investors by making them less informed. He also discovered that the deadweight loss of capacity signalling is another cost of integration, which could spread all over an integrated chain. His on-going research expands extant literatures by showing that cost of integration makes supply chain integration less likely.

Research Expertise

Research Interests

• Operations & Supply Chain Management
• Management Sciences
• Risk Management