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Research Seminar Series - Operations & Analytics

Description

Dr. Saurabh Bansal
Professor of Supply Chain Management and Faculty of Operations Research
Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University

An Ambiguity Framework to Inform Optimal Portfolio Data Allocation for Data-Driven Optimization: Analysis and Application to Agribusiness

In developing new seed varieties, agribusiness firms must evaluate, select, and scale up promising products across diverse and rapidly changing climatic regions. A central challenge is understanding yield uncertainty—the number of bushels produced per acre—when traditional parametric assumptions no longer hold. As climate and genetics interact in complex ways, firms increasingly rely on data-driven methods, using yield observations from test fields as scenarios in stochastic optimization models to determine large-scale production acreage.

However, these approaches depend on the amount of data collected. While recent research provides performance bounds that improve with more observations, gathering yield data from test fields is expensive. With a fixed testing budget and a portfolio of seed varieties, the firm must decide how to allocate limited data-collection resources.

In this work, we show how existing performance bounds map naturally into an ambiguity space that captures uncertainty more transparently. We then develop a framework to balance the cost of collecting additional data against the benefit of tighter performance guarantees across a portfolio of seeds. Finally, we describe the firm’s implementation of this protocol and the resulting gains. The approach is general and extends to a wide range of performance bounds in operations research.

Biography

Dr. Saurabh Bansal is a Professor of Supply Chain Management and a faculty member in Operations Research at the Pennsylvania State University. He received his PhD in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. His research focuses on decision making under risk and uncertainty, with emphasis on eliciting managerial judgments when data are limited, understanding how managers perceive uncertain environments, and developing protocols to support decision making under uncertainty. He collaborates with firms across multiple industries to study these problems.

Featuring: Dr. Saurabh Bansal, Professor of Supply Chain Management and Faculty of Operations Research - Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University

Start Date & Time

November 21, 2025 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

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Location

Business Building 1.01.20L

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Campus Events