About

Simone Marinesi is an Associate Professor at ESCP Business School in Paris, France, where he teaches Operations Management and Supply Chain Management courses. Prior to his current position, he was an Assistant Professor in the Operations, Information, and Decisions Department at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he continues to teach as a Lecturer. He holds a PhD in Technology and Operations Management from INSEAD and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Industrial Engineering cum laude from the University of Bologna. His research focuses on innovative business practices from an operational perspective, aiming to find new ways to create value for firms, customers, and the environment. His work has examined business models such as rewards-based crowdfunding, threshold discounts, and grocery e-tailing, with a recent expansion into sustainability topics like energy storage technologies. His articles have been published in top-tier international journals, including Management Science and Manufacturing and Service Operations Management. With a background as a management consultant in Italy, Simone brings practical industry experience to his academic work and teaching, and has received several teaching awards for his passionate approach to education.

Research topics

• Finance
• Business
• Computer Security
• Computer Science
• Microeconomics
• Electrical engineering
• Business administration
• Economics
• Engineering
• Law
• Actuarial science
• Environmental economics

Selected publications

• When Batteries Meet Hydrogen: Dual-Storage Investments for Load-Shifting Purposes

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• When Should the Off-Grid Sun Shine at Night? Optimum Renewable Generation and Energy Storage Investments

  Management Science · 2023 · 36 citations

  • Environmental economics
  • Business
  • Economics

  Globally, 1.5 billion people live off the grid, with their only access to electricity often limited to operationally expensive fossil fuel generators. Solar power has risen as a sustainable and less costly option, but its generation is variable during the day and nonexistent at night. Thanks to recent technological advances, which have made large-scale electricity storage economically viable, a combination of solar generation and storage holds the promise of cheaper, greener, and more reliable off-grid power in the future. Still, it is not yet well understood how to jointly determine optimal capacity levels for renewable generation and storage. Our work aims to shed light on this question by developing a model of strategic capacity investment in both renewable generation and storage to match demand with supply in off-grid use cases while relying on fossil fuel as backup. Despite the complexity of the underlying model, we are able to extract two general results. First, we find that solar capacity and storage capacity are strategic complements, except in cases with very high investment in generation capacity, when they surprisingly turn into strategic substitutes with implications for long-term investment decisions. Second, we develop a simple heuristic to determine which storage technology, within a given portfolio, can turn a profit in the broadest set of market conditions and thus, is likely to be adopted first. We find that currently, low-efficiency, cheap technologies, such as thermal, can more easily turn a profit in off-grid applications than high-efficiency, expensive ones, such as lithium-ion batteries. We then develop two newsvendor-like approximations of the general model that are analytically tractable, yield precise values for the optimal investment decisions and profit in some cases, and provide bounds to the optimal investment decisions and profits in all other cases. To conclude, we calibrate our models to measure the accuracy of our solutions utilizing real-life data from three geographically-diverse islands, and then, we use our approximations to provide high-level insights on the role that large-scale storage will play in the years ahead as technology improves, carbon taxes are levied, and solar becomes cheaper. This paper was accepted by Beril Toktay, Special Section of Management Science on Business and Climate Change. Funding: This work was supported by the Mack Institute for Innovation Management at the Wharton School as well as the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.04129 .

  PublisherDOI

• When the Wind of Change Blows, Build Batteries? Optimum Renewable Generation and Energy Storage Investments.

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Does Crowdfunding Benefit Entrepreneurs and Venture Capital Investors?

  Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2020 · 75 citations

  • Business
  • Finance
  • Business administration
  PublisherDOI

• Rethinking Crowdfunding Platform Design: Mechanisms to Deter Misconduct and Improve Efficiency

  Management Science · 2020 · 145 citations

  • Computer Security
  • Computer Science
  • Business

  Lacking credible rule-enforcement mechanisms to punish misconduct, existing reward-based crowdfunding platforms can leave backers exposed to two risks: entrepreneurs may run away with backers’ money (funds misappropriation), and product specifications may be misrepresented (performance opacity). We show that each of these risks can materially impact crowdfunding efficiency, and, when jointly present, they interact with each other in ways that can dampen or, more worryingly, amplify their individual adverse effects. To mitigate these risks, we propose two mechanisms based on deferred payments. The first involves stopping the campaign once the funding goal is reached and servicing any unmet demand in the aftermarket. The second involves escrowing any funds raised in excess of the goal, as insurance for backers. We show that early stopping dominates escrow and boosts platform revenues. Pairing these deferred payment designs with (costly) performance verification contingencies can bring additional gains, but doing so can flip their relative performance, with escrow coming out on top. Overall, by accounting for different timing (pre- versus post-campaign) and enforcement rules (mandatory versus optional) of the verification contingencies, we analyze a total of 10 different designs and show that two of them dominate: the early stopping design and the escrow design with mandatory ex-post verification. We conclude by providing recommendations for which design works best under different conditions and exploring the potential of crowdsourced performance checks. This paper was accepted by Terry Taylor, operations management.

  PublisherDOI

• Updating the Crowdfunding Narrative

  ScholarlyCommons (University of Pennsylvania) · 2019-07-08 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Policymakers concerned about stimulating small business and entrepreneurial growth need to better understand the dynamics of crowdfunding as a vehicle for that growth. The conventional wisdom is that raising cash through crowdfunding always benefits entrepreneurs. But that is not the complete picture. In reality, there are ways in which entrepreneurs, as well as VCs looking for new investments, may actually be left worse off after a successful crowdfunding campaign. This issue brief examines the potential pitfalls of a successful campaign. These include a moral hazard problem that comes into play when entrepreneurs explore both crowdfunding and venture capital investment, which can lead to a breakdown in negotiations between entrepreneurs and VCs, leaving the VC without a potentially lucrative project and the entrepreneur without the VC’s essential financial support, expertise, and guidance. While the brief focuses on reward-based crowdfunding platforms, the pitfalls described herein likely apply as well to peer-to-peer lending, real estate, and equity-crowdfunding platforms too.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Threshold Discounting: Operational Benefits, Potential Drawbacks, and Optimal Design

  Springer series in supply chain management · 2019-01-01 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Environmental Impact of the Advent of Online Grocery Retailing

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2019-01-01 · 28 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Designing Crowdfunding Platform Rules to Deter Misconduct

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2018-01-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Online Compendium to the book chapter 'Threshold Discounting: Operational Beneets, Potential Drawbacks, and Optimal Design'

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2017-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Karan Girotra

  SC Johnson (United States)

  8 shared

• Gerry Tsoukalas

  7 shared

• Serguei Netessine

  6 shared

• Elena Belavina

  SC Johnson (United States)

  5 shared

• Christian Kaps

  3 shared

• Volodymyr Babich

  3 shared

• Ekaterina Astashkina

  2 shared

Labs

• Operations, Information and Decisions DepartmentPI

Awards & honors

• Management Science Best Paper Award (2023)
• Management Science R&R (Revise and Resubmit)