On the morning of June 27, 2024, the Business School held the 31st Session of the Series of Academic Lectures Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Founding of Central University of Finance and Economics and the 11th Session of the Excellent Academic Forum Lecture Series in 2024 at the Conference Room 615 of the Main Teaching Building on theXueyuanSouth Road Campus of the Central University of Finance and Economics. Professor Chen Jing from Dalhousie University was invited as a guest speaker of this lecture. The Business School’s teachers, doctoral students and master students attended this event.

This meeting was chaired by ProfessorYan Nina from the Business School. Before the official start of this lecture,ProfessorYan Nina introduced Professor Chen Jing’s resume in detail. Chen Jing is the William A. Black Chair in Commerce, a professor of the Department of Management Science & Information System at Dalhousie University. She received a PhD in Management Science from theUniversity of Western Ontario. Her research interests include competitive channel and supply chain management, the interface of operations management and marketing, and customer returns. She has published more than 90 papers in various journals such as "Journal of Operational Research", "Decision Science", "The International Journal of Management Science", "Naval Research Logistics", and "Transportation Research Part E". She currently serves as the associate editor of "The International Journal of Management Science", "The Journal of the Operational Research Society" and "International Transactions in Operational Research", and has published 22 Ivey business cases. Besides, she serves on the board of directors of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The topicof the lecture delivered by ProfessorChen Jing is “Managing Customer Returns in the Supply Chain”. Effective management of customer returns is critical to supply chain efficiency and customer satisfaction. Manufacturers can improve product quality, while retailers can enhance customer satisfaction and manage customer returns by providing in-store services. This research focuses on the supply chain where retailers offer full-refund customer return policies, the optimal quality improvement strategies of manufacturers and the optimal in-store service strategies of retailers. This research indicates that, from the perspective of the entire supply chain, the optimal customer return management strategy is consistent with the respective interests of manufacturers and retailers. Each of the four supply chain strategies (no quality improvement and no in-store service, in-store service but no quality improvement, quality improvement but no in-store service, and both quality improvement and in-store service) is likely to be dominant strategy. This depends on several factors. Besides, this research indicates that the optimal strategy is that retailers provide in-store services and manufacturers implement quality improvements when manufacturers can flexibly determine the level of quality improvement, retailers can flexibly adjust the level of in-store services, or both parties can decide their own strategies.

After the sharing, with regard to the topic of ProfessorChen Jing’s lecture, the attending teachers and students actively participated in the discussion about theoretical writing, research methodology and publication of high-level papers, further deepening their academic exchanges.

The “Excellent Academic Forum” is an academic exchange platform established by the Business School to fulfill the mission of “contributing new management knowledge”, which focuses on cutting-edge theoretical issues and organizational development dilemmas in the discipline of business administration and the Chinese enterprise management practice, and brings together frontier ideas and innovative ideas in China and abroad, so as to explore Chinese solutions for China's social and economic development.