Saman Lagzi

Welcome to my page!

I am Saman Lagzi, an Assistant Professor of Operations and Decision Sciences at the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University. Satrting Fall 2023, I will be joining UNC Kenan–Flagler Business School. Broadly speaking, my primary research focus is on integrating data analytics into the process of decision-making. In my research, I use data, and design ways to use data, to better guide the decision-making process. My research interests are in the areas of Revenue Management and Pricing and Healthcare Operations Management. 

Using mathematical modelling, integer programming and approximation algorithms, in one of my research projects I have shown how firms can use their gathered transaction data to price an assortment of products, without running the risk of a demand model misspecification. In another project, using empirical analysis and econometric methods, I shed light on the effects of employing piece-rate compensation schemes by firms whose workers have discretion over which tasks to work on. 

More recently, I am focused on optimizing the output of a fitted neural network over its input. By showing a performance guarantee for this methodology, in terms of the generalization bound of the fitted neural network, when applied to certain stochastic optimization problems, I showcase how it can have significant advantages in solving some of the cornerstone problems in revenue management, such as the newsvendor problem with observable demand features, and the personalized assortment pricing problem.

 In September 2022 I received my PhD in Operations Management and Statistics from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. My PhD advisor was Professor Ming Hu, and Professor Gonzalo Romero was my co-advisor. During my PhD, I also closely worked with Professor Ningyuan Chen and Professor Joseph Milner. Before starting my PhD studies, I received a MMath degree from the Combinatorics and Optimization department at the University of Waterloo (September 2014 to August 2016).  I also received a M. Eng. degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Auburn University (August 2012 to May 2014). Prior to that, I received my B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran (September 2007 to February 2012).