Serguei Netessine

• Vishrut Rana, Christian Kaps, Serguei Netessine (Working), Moving Money Around: Mobile Energy Storage and the Value of Geospatial Flexibility. Abstract

  The growth of renewable energy has intensified the need for solutions that can address temporal and spatial mismatches between electricity supply and demand, arising from the intermittency of renewables. While battery storage has emerged as a key tool to store renewable electricity for future use, storage developers face diminishing and uncertain returns. In this paper, we first demonstrate how local competition and transient transmission capacity congestion lead to low and uncertain returns for Stationary Energy Storage System (SESS) operators. Using six years of price data from the PJM Interconnection and a staggered diff-in-diff approach, we estimate that an additional storage installation reduces existing SESS’s annual profit at that location by $7,820 per megawatt on average. We then estimate how Mobile Energy Storage Systems (MESS)—an innovative business model that allows grid-scale batteries to be relocated—can increase operators’ returns and improve grid-level congestion by providing geospatial flexibility. We introduce a dynamic programming-based forecasting framework for MESS developers’ relocation and operating decisions and show that, even when relocation costs are high, MESS’s profit consistently outperforms even the best-sited SESS by 11-47%. In part, this profit increase is driven by MESS capturing up to 22.5% more value from congestion prices than SESS, better aligning developer and grid incentives. Our findings quantify how competition and transience of price patterns limit storage profitability and highlight how leveraging mobile storage inventory in the energy transition can help storage developers, grid planners, and policymakers to accelerate storage build-out, renewable integration, and grid flexibility.

• Vishrut Rana, Christian Kaps, Serguei Netessine (Working), When Where Watt: Harnessing the Value of Time and Location for Renewable Electricity Generation. Abstract
  Problem definition: Investments in renewable energy have surged worldwide in recent years, with over $2 trillion spent globally on clean energy. This surge was driven by growing policy support, concerns about energy security, and, most importantly, the cost competitiveness of renewable energy. However, while technological advances have ensured that the costs of wind turbines and solar panels have fallen, these lower costs have not translated into increased profits for renewable energy generation. Renewable power plants generate lower revenue than their conventional counterparts, such as coal and gas, because renewable electricity is often generated in locations and at times with low wholesale market prices. These lower profits for renewables mean that investments still fall short of meeting global clean energy targets.

  Methodology/results: To increase profitability, we propose a new site selection metric for renewable power plants, Quality Adjusted Power Value (QAPV), which captures the monetary value of electricity by accounting for the time and location of renewable generation. Our analysis integrates vast amounts of data from diverse sources. We used geospatial natural resource satellite data and highly granular electricity price data to validate this metric on wind power plants installed in Texas between 2008 and 2014. We found that revenue over this seven-year period increases by a median of 21% if the plants were sited using QAPV. We discuss mechanisms for this increase and find that the increase in revenue remains positive and significant even when proposed sites are restricted to a particular district or with specific access to transmission.

  Managerial implications: For renewable developers, our site selection metric can be used to identify the highest revenue-generating investment sites, and for policymakers, our results on counterfactual revenue can enable discussions around policies that streamline efficient investments in renewable energy, which we demonstrate to increase consumer welfare.
• Christian Kaps, Simone Marinesi, Serguei Netessine (2023), When Should the Off-grid Sun Shine at Night? Optimum Renewable Generation and Energy Storage Investments, Management Science. Abstract

  Globally, 1.5 billion people live off the grid, 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 non-existent 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 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.

• Jingxing (Rowena) Gan, Gerry Tsoukalas, Serguei Netessine (Under Review), Financing Platforms with Cryptocurrency: Token Retention, Sales Commission, and ICO Caps. Abstract

  Centralized platforms (e.g., Uber) rely primarily on sales commission (aka, service fees) to generate revenues whereas decentralized blockchain-based startups (e.g., Filecoin) often forego these in favor of token retention. We show that both levers help to overcome moral hazard and incentivize platform building, but they aren’t perfect substitutes and imply a strategic trade-off: the commission approach generally leads to higher long-term profits for the platform founders, whereas token retention can lead to higher service levels, benefiting the service providers and users. Furthermore, the two levers also require different ICO designs when raising capital: commission works best when paired with uncapped ICOs (i.e., unlimited token supply) whereas token retention works best with capped ICOs under certain conditions. These findings offer some guidance and explanations for the operating and ICO design choices of decentralized platforms.

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  Links
• Jingxing (Rowena) Gan, Gerry Tsoukalas, Serguei Netessine (2020), Initial Coin Offerings, Speculation, and Asset Tokenization, Management Science, forthcoming. Abstract

  Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are an emerging form of fundraising for Blockchain-based startups. We examine how ICOs can be leveraged in the context of asset tokenization, whereby
  firms issue tokens backed by future assets (i.e., inventory) to finance growth. We (i) make suggestions on how to design such \asset-backed” ICOs—including optimal token
  floating and pricing for both utility and equity tokens (aka, Security Token Offerings, STOs)—taking into account moral hazard (cash diversion), product characteristics and customer demand uncertainty, (ii) make predictions on ICO success/failure, and (iii) discuss implications on rm operating strategy. We show that in unregulated environments, ICOs can lead to significant agency costs, underproduction, and loss of rm value. These inefficiencies, however, fade as product margins and demand characteristics (mean/variance) improve, and are less severe under equity (rather than utility) token issuance. Importantly, the advantage of equity tokens stems from their inherent ability to better align incentives, and thus continues to hold even absent regulation.

  Description
  2019 INFORMS Section on Finance Best Student Paper Award Honorable Mention
• Serguei Netessine (2019), At Your Service on the Table: Impact of Tabletop Technology on Restaurant Performance, Management Science. Abstract

  Some industries such as healthcare and financial services have reported significant productivity gains from introduction of new technologies. However, more traditional, labor-intensive industries are lagging behind. We use granular data to examine the impact of a customer-facing technology (a tabletop device that facilitates the table service process) on the check size and meal duration aspects of restaurant performance. The restaurant chain in our study implemented tabletop devices in a staggered manner, offering us a quasi-experimental setting in which to apply a difference-in-difference technique and identify the causal effect of the technology. We find that the tabletop technology is likely to improve average sales per check by 2.91% and reduce the meal duration by 9.74%, which increases the sales per minute or sales productivity by approximately 10.77%. Various robustness checks of our empirical strategy and post-hoc analyses find that efficient customers, who have lower cost of adopting new technology, generate more sales and have shorter meal duration than the inefficient customers do. Tabletop technology allows low-ability waiters to improve their performance more significantly than high-ability waiters. Overall, our results indicate great potential for introducing tabletop technology in a large service industry that currently lacks digitalization.

• Marshall L. Fisher, Santiago Gallino, Serguei Netessine, Retailers Are Squandering Their Most Potent Weapons in Harvard Business Review, January - February 2019. Abstract

  Instead of viewing salespeople as an expendable cost, store managers should treat them as an asset in their battle with e-tailers.

• Marshall L. Fisher, Santiago Gallino, Serguei Netessine (2018), Does Online Training Work in Retail?, M&SOM. Abstract

  A knowledgeable retail sales associate (SA) can explain the features of available product variants and give the customer sufficient confidence in her choice or suggest alternatives so that she becomes willing to purchase. Although it is plausible that increasing an SA’s product knowledge will increase sales, training is not costless and turnover is high in retail, so most retailers provide little or no training. Thus, an important question is how much, if at all, does training increase an SA’s sales productivity? To answer this question, we partnered with Experticity, a firm that provides online, self-guided training modules for retail SAs, and Dillard’s, a leading department store chain whose more than 50,000 SAs had access to the Experticity modules. We assembled a data set of the training history and sales productivity of Dillard’s associates over a two-year period. We found that as SAs engaged in training over time, their sales rate increased by 1.8 percent for every online module taken, which is a much higher benefit than the direct or indirect costs associated with this training. We also found that willingness to engage in voluntary training was an indicator of raw talent; those SAs who engaged in training were 20 percent more productive prior to any training and 46 percent more productive after training than those who took no training. Surprisingly, brand-specific training did not significantly affect the sales of the focal brand but did improve overall sales of all brands. Our evidence of successful online learning may be of general interest given that, to date, analysis of massive open online courses has shown poor engagement by participants and questionable outcomes.

  Related
  Links

  SSRN
• Marshall L. Fisher, Santiago Gallino, Serguei Netessine (2018), Setting Retail Staffing Levels: A Methodology Validated with Implementation, . Abstract

  We describe a three-step process that a retailer can use to set retail store sales staff levels. First, use historical data on revenue and planned and actual staffing levels by store to estimate how revenue varies with the staffing level at each store. We disentangle the endogeneity between revenue and staffing levels by focusing on randomly occurring deviations between planned and actual labor. Second, using historical analysis as a guide, we validate these results by changing the staffing levels in a few test stores. Finally, we implement the results chain-wide and measure the impact. We describe the successful deployment of this process with a large specialty retailer. We find that 1) the implementation validates predictions of the historical analysis, including the use of the variation between planned staffing and actual staffing as an exogenous shock, 2) implementation in 168 stores over a 6-month period produces a 4.5% revenue increase and a nearly $7.4 million annual profit increase, after accounting for the cost of the additional labor, and 3) the impact of staffing level on revenue varies greatly by store, and therefore staffing levels should also vary, with more sales staff relative to revenue assigned to those stores where sales staff have the greatest impact on revenue. Specifically, we found the largest impact of store labor in stores with the largest average basket sizes, located in regions with good growth potential, facing certain competitors (e.g., Wal-Mart), and run by long-serving managers.

  Related
  Links

  SSRN
• Yuqian Xu, Tom Tan, Serguei Netessine (Under Review), When Is the Root of All Evil Not Money? The Impact of Load on Operational Risk at a Commercial Bank. Abstract

  Operational risk is now among the three most significant types of risks in the financial services industry, and its management is mandated by Basel II regulation. This paper studies how bank operational risk event frequency (or error rate) and severity (potential losses) are affected by workload to inform better labor decisions. To achieve this goal, we use a unique operational risk event data set from a commercial bank in China that contains 1,441 operational risk events in two years. We find that workload has a U-shaped impact on operational risk frequency. More specifically, the error rate of operational risk events would decrease first as workload increases and then increase. In addition, we show that workload has an inverted-U shaped impact on bank profit. Based on the causal relationships between workload and operational risk events and profit, respectively, we discuss bank capital allocation impact of changing the staffing level among branches so as to reduce operational risk losses and improve profit. We compare our optimal staffing policy with bank’s original policy, and estimate that the new staffing policy would reduce the current number of employees by 7.56%, which would further decrease the number of risk events by 4.51%, cut the total losses by 4.58%, and increase profits by 1.24%.

• All Research from Serguei Netessine »

Current Courses

• OIDD6140 - Innovation

  The course is first and foremost an intensive, integrative, project course in which student teams create one or more real businesses. Some businesses spun out of the course and now managed by alumni include Terrapass Inc. and Smatchy Inc. The project experience is an exciting context in which to learn key tools and fundamentals useful in innovation, problem solving, and design. Examples of these tools and fundamentals are: problem definition, identification of opportunities, generating alternatives, selecting among alternatives, principles of data graphics, and managing innovation pipelines. The course requires a commitment of at least 10 hours of work outside of class and comfort working on unstructured, interdisciplinary problems. Students with a strong interest in innovation and entrepreneurship are particularly encouraged to enroll. Please read carefully the syllabus posted on-line before registering for this course.

  OIDD6140001 ( Syllabus )

  OIDD6140003 ( Syllabus )

  OIDD6140005 ( Syllabus )

  OIDD6140007 ( Syllabus )

• OIDD9950 - Dissertation Preparation

  OIDD9950024 ( Syllabus )

Past Courses

• OIDD6140 - Innovation

  The course is first and foremost an intensive, integrative, project course in which student teams create one or more real businesses. Some businesses spun out of the course and now managed by alumni include Terrapass Inc. and Smatchy Inc. The project experience is an exciting context in which to learn key tools and fundamentals useful in innovation, problem solving, and design. Examples of these tools and fundamentals are: problem definition, identification of opportunities, generating alternatives, selecting among alternatives, principles of data graphics, and managing innovation pipelines. The course requires a commitment of at least 10 hours of work outside of class and comfort working on unstructured, interdisciplinary problems. Students with a strong interest in innovation and entrepreneurship are particularly encouraged to enroll. Please read carefully the syllabus posted on-line before registering for this course.

• OIDD9400 - Operations Mgmt

  Concepts, models, and theories relevant to the management of the processes required to provide goods or services to consumers in both the public and private sectors. Includes production, inventory and distribution functions, scheduling of service or manufacturing activities, facility capacity planning and design, location analysis, product design and choice of technology. The methodological basis for the course includes management science, economic theory,organization theory, and management information system theory.

• Finalist in the 2023 INFORMS Technology, Innovation Management, and Entrepreneurship Section’s (TIMES) best working paper competition for "Privately-Owned Battery Storage- Reshaping The Way We Do Energy"., 2024
• Distinguished Fellow of MSOM Society of INFORMS, 2018
• Finalist, 2015 MSOM Service Management SIG Prize for the best paper on service management published in the past three years., 2017
• Distinguished Service Award from M&SOM Society of INFORMS, 2016
• Runner-up, MSOM Service Management SIG Best Paper Award, 2017 (for the paper Are consumers strategic? Structural estimation from the air travel industry)., 1970
• Finalist (one out of three), Management Science best paper award in Operations Management, (for the paper Are consumers strategic? Structural estimation from the air travel industry)., 1970

• 3M's complicated road to enough N95 capacity took many hands, Star Tribune - 04/25/2020
• Chinese-affiliated companies help supply PPE to US, China Daily - 04/01/2020
• How to create a successful initial coin offering CFO Tech Outlook, CFO Tech Outlook - 11/06/2019
• Tired of waiting on a waiter?, American Association for Advancement of Science - 07/28/2019
• Carbon Taxes Help The Environment . . . But May Not Help Renewables, Forbes - 01/19/2018
• Too Few Retail Workers On The Floor, Too Few Retail Sales And Profits On P&L Statement, Forbes - 12/16/2017
• Inside Unilever's open, spacious co-working space, Tech in Asia - 08/07/2017

Knowledge @ Wharton

• Decoding the AI Bubble: Tulips, Dot-Coms, or Something Else?, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/16/2025
• Can Reminders Help You Save More Money?, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/15/2025
• How Banks Can Be Change Agents in Climate Consciousness, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/15/2025
• Why Today’s AI Bubble May Fuel Tomorrow’s Economic Growth, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/12/2025
• Best of 2025, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/12/2025
• Understanding the True Costs Behind Credit Card Lending, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/10/2025
• Best of 2025, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/09/2025
• Why Many M&A Deals Fail — and How to Beat the Odds, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/08/2025
• When Employees Feel Slighted, They Work Less, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/08/2025
• How Amazon Fulfillment Centers Influence Local Economic Growth, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/05/2025

My startup advisory:

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