Operations and Information Management Department

Quick Links

» Publications
» Current Research
» Miscellaneous
» Awards

Richard Kum-yew Lai
Assistant Professor

Richard is a faculty member in the Department of Operations and Information Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

DBA, Harvard

SM (Management), MIT

SB (Mathematics), MIT

SB (Computer science and engienering), MIT.

Richard was previously CEO of dollarDEX Investments, co-head of Bain & Company's Asia Financial Services Practice, McKinsey consultant (mostly in financial services, retail/consumer goods, transportation/freight, and telecom), MIT research scientist (see frequently cited authors in human-computer interaction, and US patents 5,900,870, 5,794,001, 5,790,116, and 5,727,175), banker, and soldier.

He is/was also a Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, a member of the Global Advisory Committee for the international asset management arm of one of the top 5 banks in the US, and a government appointee to the board and various committees of Singapore's agency for intellectual property rights.

Publications

Soh C.K, Soh A.K., Richard Kum-yew Lai (1997), LIBRA: A high fidelity knowledge-based system for recommending scheduling programs, Journal of AI in Engineering, 11(2), 77-90

Jim Ayala, Richard Kum-yew Lai, Benjamin Mok, Frank Wei, Henry Zhang (1996), Winning China's consumer market in the 21st century, The McKinsey Quarterly, P.178

Jim Ayala, Richard Kum-yew Lai (1996), China's Consumer Market: A Huge Opportunity to Fail?, The McKinsey Quarterly, (3), 57-71

Soh C.K, Soh A.K., Richard Kum-yew Lai (1995), Principled Approach to Design of Hierarchical Abstractions, ASME Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, Volume 9, Number 2

Soh C.K, Wong W.P., Phang K.W, Richard Kum-yew Lai (1995), Integrating knowledge and data processing for construction scheduling, Journal of Civil Engineering Systems, Vol 12, pp 287-305

View More

Current Research

Richard Kum-yew Lai 2008, Is Inventory’s Fiscal Year End Effect Caused by Sales Timing? A Test Using a Natural Experiment from Germany

Richard Kum-yew Lai 2006, Inventory Signals

Richard Kum-yew Lai 2006, Inventory and the Shape of the Earth

Richard Kum-yew Lai 2006, Does Public Infrastructure Reduce Private Inventory?

Richard Kum-yew Lai 2006, Executive Quirks in Operational Decisions

View More

Conference Papers

Semi-structured messages are surprisingly useful for computer-supported coordination.
Proceedings of the 1986 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, 1986. With Thomas W. Malone, Kenneth R. Grant, Ramana Rao, David Rosenblitt.

Object Lens: A Spreadsheet for Cooperative Work.
Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 1988: 115-124. With Thomas W. Malone.

Experiments with Oval: A Radically Tailorable Tool for Cooperative Work.
Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 1992: 289-297. With Thomas W. Malone, Christopher Fry.

Object Lens: Letting End-Users Create Cooperative Work Applications.
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems 1991. With Thomas W. Malone.

Book Chapters

Two Design Principles for Collaboration Technology: Examples of Semiformal Systems and Radical Tailorability, in Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001. With Thomas W. Malone, Kenneth R. Grant.

What's in Design Rationale?, in Thomas P Moran and John M Carroll (eds), Design Rationale: Concepts, Techniques, and Use, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996. With Jintae Lee

The information lens: an intelligent system for information sharing and coordination, in Margrethe H. Olson (ed), Technological support for work group collaboration, 1989. With Thomas W. Malone, Kenneth R. Grant Ramana Rao, David Rosenblitt.

Agents for information sharing and coordination: A history and some reflections, in Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Ed., Software Agents, Menlo Park, CA: AAAI/MIT Press, 1997 With Thomas W. Malone, Kenneth R. Grant.

The Information Lens: An Intelligent System for Information Sharing and Coordination, in Ronald M. Baecker (Ed), Readings in Groupware and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: Assisting Human-Human Collaboration, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1993. With Thomas W. Malone, Kenneth R. Grant Ramana Rao, David Rosenblitt.

View More

Older Working Papers

Analysis of Design Rationale Representations, March 1992 MIT Sloan School of Management. Working Paper 84-92. With Jintae Lee.

A Comparative Analysis of Design Rationale Representations, May 1991 MIT Sloan School of Management. Working Paper 3405. With Jintae Lee.

Experiments with Oval: A Radically Tailorable Tool for Cooperative Work, December 1994 MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper 3462. With Thomas W. Malone, Christopher Fry.

Honors And Awards

Editorial Review Board, Journal of Operations Management, 2009

Harvard Business School Howard H. Stevenson Family Doctoral Fellowship, 2007-2008

MSOM Student Paper Competition (Honorable Mention), 2007

POMS Wickham Skinner Award (runner-up, tie), 2006

Harvard Business School Wyss Award for Excellence in Doctoral Research, 2006

View More

Richard Kum-yew Lai
3730 Walnut Street
Room 551 Jon M. Huntsman Hall
Philadelphia, PA19104
Phone: (215) 898-1630
lairk@wharton.upenn.edu

Research Interests:

Empirical operations management

Operations from an investor's perspective

Human rights and the supply chain

Last Modified November 11, 2009