Irene Lo

Irene Lo is an assistant professor in management science & engineering at Stanford University. She holds an AB from Princeton University and a PhD from Columbia University. 

Lo’s research is on designing matching markets and assignment processes to improve market outcomes, with a focus on public sector applications and socially responsible operations research. Her research interests also include mechanism design for social good and graph theory.

King Center Supported Research

2020 - 2021 Academic Year | Junior Faculty Research Grant

Improving Livelihoods of the Global Poor through Information-Sharing Platforms

Many of the crises of our world today, such as global poverty, food insecurity and climate change, are inextricably linked with the employment and livelihoods of the global poor. At the same time, there has been rapid growth in mobile phone adoption in the developing world, fueling the emergence of several digital platforms that aim to provide the global poor with commercial and employment information. This research seeks to implement, test, and redesign such information-sharing platforms for informal supply chains. In two phases, a field experiment and a data-guided redesign, the project aims to increase widespread access to commercial information. The field experiment will test the effectiveness of a pilot platform which requires users to pay for access to information by contributing information themselves. Researchers will then conduct follow-up theoretical work informed by the experimental results.