We will discuss a miscellany of applications of pooling, one of the most basic concepts in operations management in the age of the sharing economy. The concept manifests itself in various forms, such as resource, temporal, and spatial pooling, on both the demand and supply sides. We will present analytical models to capture tradeoffs in pooling, provide managerial insights, and discuss practical implications.

Bio: Ming Hu is the University of Toronto Distinguished Professor of Business Operations and Analytics, a professor of operations management at the Rotman School of Management, and an Amazon Scholar. He received a master's degree in Applied Mathematics from Brown University in 2003, and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Columbia University in 2009. For more details of his research, please visit http://ming.hu.