Past Winners

2022 Best Paper Award Winners

The winners of the twelfth PSOR best paper competition were announced at the PSOR business meeting at the 2022 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, IN.

The awardees were:


First Place

"Split Liver Transplantation: An Analytical Decision Support Model"
Yanhan (Savannah) Tang (Carnegie Mellon University), Alan Scheller-Wolf (Carnegie Mellon University), Sridhar Tayur (Carnegie Mellon University), Emily R. Perito (University of California, San Francisco), and John P. Roberts (University of California, San Francisco). http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3877523

Second Place
"Interpretable Models for the Automated Detection of Human Trafficking in Illicit Massage Businesses"

Margaret Tobey (North Carolina State University), Ruoting Li (North Carolina State University), Osman Y. Özaltın (North Carolina State University), Maria E. Mayorga (North Carolina State University), and Sherrie Caltagirone (Global Emancipation Network). https://doi.org/10.1080/24725854.2022.2113187

Finalists
"Competition and Collaboration on Fundraising for Short-Term Disaster Response: The Impact on Earmarking and Performance" 
Arian Aflaki (University of Pittsburgh) and Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez (Indiana University). http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3705595

"Analysis of Farm Equipment Sharing in Emerging Economies"
Olufunke Adebola (Hello Tractor), Priyank Arora (University of Massachusetts Amherst), and Can Zhang (Duke University). http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4190725

"Combating Excessive Overtime in Global Supply Chains"
Anyan Qi (University of Texas at Dallas), Jiayu Chen (University of Calgary), and Chuanya Jiao (University of Science and Technology of China). http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4134422   

Judging Committee

The judging committee was co-chaired by Bhavani Shanker Uppari (SMU) and Serguei Netessine (Penn).

The judges were:

Amrita Kundu (Georgetown)
Anna Saez de Tejada Cuenca (IESE)
Arzum Akkas (Boston)
Ashish Kabra (Maryland)
Auyon Siddiq (UCLA)
Chris Parker (American)
Dawson Kaaua (Georgetown)
Elena Belavina (Cornell)
Fanyin Zheng (Columbia)
Hamsa Bastani (Wharton)
Harish Guda (Arizona)
Harwin de Vries (Erasmus)
Helen Zhou (SMU)
Hummy Song (Wharton)
Joel Goh (NUS)
Jonas Jonasson (MIT)
Kejia Hu (Vanderbilt)
Kimon Drakopoulos (USC)
Lesley Meng (Yale)
Maria Ibanez (Kellogg)
Morvarid Rahmani (GaTech)
Nitish Jain (LBS)
Ozge Yapar (Indiana)
Philippe Blaettchen (Bayes)
Pnina Feldman (Boston)
Prashant Chintapalli (Ivey)
Ruslan Momot (Michigan)
Safak Yucel (Georgetown)
Sandeep Rath (UNC)
Song-Hee Kim (SNU)
Soroush Saghafian (Harvard)
Sripad Devalkar (ISB)
Vanitha Virudachalam (UIUC)
Vivek Choudhary (NTU)
Xin Fang (SMU)
Yini Gao (SMU)

2021 Best Paper Award Winners


The winners of the eleventh PSOR best paper competition were announced at the PSOR business meeting at the 2021 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Anaheim, CA.

The judging committee was co-chaired by Somya Singhvi (USC) and Yanchong Zheng (MIT) and our judges were:

Amrita Kundu (McDonough School of Business)
Anyan Qi (University of Texas at Dallas)
Ashish Kabra (University of Maryland, College Park)
Auyon Siddiq (UCLA Anderson)
Can Zhang (Duke University)
Christian Blanco (The Ohio State University)
Divya Singhvi (NYU Stern)
Deeksha Sinha (MIT)
Ekaterina Astashkina (Ross School of Business)
Elisabeth Paulson (Stanford University)
Irene Lo (Stanford University)
Morvarid Rahmani (Georgia Tech)
Priyank Arora (Isenberg School of Management)
Ruth Beer (Baruch College)
Saed Alizamir (Yale University)
Samantha Keppler (University of Michigan)
Sebastien Martin (Kellogg School of Management)
Song-Hee Kim (USC)
Soroush Saghafian (Harvard)


The awardees were:


First Place

"Off-Grid Lighting Business Models to Serve the Poor: Evidence From a Structural Model and Field Experiments in Rwanda", Bhavani Shanker Uppari (Singapore Management University), Serguei Netessine (Wharton School), Ioana Popescu (INSEAD),   Rowan P. Clarke (Harvard Business School)


Second Place

"Deploying a Reinforcement Learning System for COVID-19 Testing at the Greek Border", Hamsa Bastani (Wharton School), Kimon Drakopoulos (USC), Vishal Gupta (USC), Jon Vlachogiannis (AgentRisk), Christos  Hadjicristodoulou (University of Thessaly), Pagona Lagiou (School of Medicine, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens),  GkikasMagiorkinis (School of Medicine, National   and KapodistrianUniversity of Athens), Dimitrios Paraskevis (School of Medicine, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), Sotirios Tsiodras(School of Medicine, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)


Finalists

"COVID-19: Prediction, Prevalence and the Operations of Vaccine Allocation", Georgia Perakis (MIT), Amine Bennouna (MIT), Joshua   Joseph (MIT), David Nze-Ndong (MIT), Divya Singhvi (NYU), Omar Skali Lami (MIT), Ioannis Spantidakis (MIT),   Leann Thayaparan(MIT), Asterios Tsiourvas (MIT)

"Unmasking human trafficking risk in commercial sex supply chains with machine learning", Pia Ramchandani (Wharton School), Hamsa Bastani  (Wharton School), Emily Wyatt (TellFinder Alliance)

2020 Best Paper Award Winners

The winners of the tenth PSOR best paper competition were announced at the PSOR business meeting at the 2020 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle.

The judging committee was chaired by Dan Adelman (University of Chicago) and our judges were:

  • Saed Alizamir Yale SOM
  • Nilay Tanik Argon UNC
  • Kate Astashkina University of Michigan Ross
  • Turgay Ayer Georgia Tech ISYE
  • Carri W. Chan Columbia
  • Soo-Haeng Cho Carnegie Mellon
  • Tinglong Dai Johns Hopkins
  • Sarang Deo Indian School of Business
  • Pnina Feldman Boston Univ Questrom
  • Evrim Didem Güneş Koç University
  • Robert C. Hampshire University of Michigan, Public Policy
  • Jonas Jonasson MIT Sloan
  • Jun Li University of Michigan
  • Irene Lo Stanford
  • Iva Rashkova Washington University
  • Soroush Saghafian Harvard Kennedy
  • Auyon Siddiq UCLA Anderson
  • Ravi Subramanian Georgia Tech Scheller
  • Joline Uichanco University of Michigan Ross
The awardees were:

First Place

"Improving Farmers' Income on Online Agri-platforms: Theory and Field Implementation of a Two-stage Auction", by Retsef Levi (MIT), Manoj Rajan (Rashtriya e Market Services Limited), Somya Singhvi (MIT), Yanchong Zheng (MIT)

Finalists

"Adaptive Clinical Trial Designs with Surrogates: When Should We Bother?" by Arielle Anderer (The Wharton School), Hamsa Bastani (The Wharton School), John Silberholz (University of Michigan)

"Online Policies for Efficient Volunteer Crowdsourcing" by Vahideh Manshadi (Yale), Scott Rodilitz (Yale)

"Heterogeneous Donor Circles for Fair Liver Transplant Allocation", by Subramanian Raghavan (University of Maryland-College Park)
Shubham Akshat (University of Maryland-College Park), Sommer Gentry (United States Naval Academy)

2019 Best Paper Award Winners

The winners of the ninth PSOR best paper competition were announced at the PSOR business meeting at the 2019 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle.

The judging committee was co-chaired by Fernanda Bravo (UCLA) and Elisa Long (UCLA) and all our judges were:

  • Jason Acimovic (Penn State Smeal)
  • Saed Alizamir (Yale SOM)
  • Kate Astashkina (Michigan Ross)
  • Turgay Ayer (Georgia Tech ISYE)
  • Christian Blanco (Ohio State Fisher)
  • Keith Chen (UCLA Anderson)
  • Pnina Feldman (Boston Univ Questrom)
  • Chaitra Gopalappa (UMass-Amherst Mech&Ind Eng)
  • Sheldon Jacobson (U of Illinois CS)
  • Jonas Jonasson (MIT Sloan)
  • Cameron Mackenzie (Iowa State Ind Eng)
  • Iva Rashkova (Washington Univ Olin)
  • Soroush Saghafian (Harvard Kennedy)
  • Auyon Siddiq (UCLA Anderson)
  • Ravi Subramanian (Georgia Tech Scheller)
  • Joline Uichanco (Michigan Ross)
The awardees were:

First Place
"An Efficient Frontier Approach to Scoring and Ranking Hospital Performance," by Dan Adelman (University of Chicago Booth)
 
Second Place
"Show or Tell? Improving Agent Decision Making in a Tanzanian Mobile Money Field Experiment," by

Jason Acimovic (Penn State Smeal), Christopher Parker (American University), David Drake (U of Colorado), and Karthik Balasubramanian (Howard University)

Finalists
"Snapshot Models of Undocumented Immigration," by Edward Kaplan (Yale SOM) and Scott Rodilitz (Yale SOM)
"Tax-Induced Inequalities in the Sharing Economy," by Yao Cui (Cornell Johnson) and Andrew Davis (Cornell Johnson)

2018 Best Paper Award Winners

The winners of the eighth PSOR best paper competition were announced at the PSOR business meeting at the 2018 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix. The Judging Committee included:
  • Saed Alizamir, Yale University
  • Carri W. Chan, Columbia University
  • Soo-Haeng Cho, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Maqbool Dada, Johns Hopkins University
  • Tinglong Dai (Chair), Johns Hopkins University
  • Pnina Feldman, Boston University
  • Sommer Gentry, United States Navy Academy
  • Maria Ibanez, Northwestern University
  • Jónas Oddur Jónasson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Nan Kong, Purdue University
  • Irene Lo, Stanford University
  • Elisa Long, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Christopher Ryan, University of Chicago
  • Soroush Saghafian, Harvard University
  • Vince Slaugh, Cornell University
  • Tolga Tezcan, London Business School
  • Ronghuo Zheng, University of Texas at Austin
The awardees were:

First Place
"Flexible FDA Approval Policies," by Taylor Corcoran, Fernanda Bravo, and Elisa L Long (UCLA)
 
Second Place
"Can Public Reporting Cure Healthcare? The Role of Quality Transparency in Improving Patient-Provider Alignment," by Soroush Saghafian (Harvard University), and Wallace J. Hopp (University of Michigan)

Finalists
“Operations Research Enables Auction to Repurpose TV Spectrum for Next Generation Wireless Technologies," by Jean L. Kiddoo (Federal Communications Commission), Evan Kwerel (Federal Communications Commission), Sasha Javid (Formerly Federal Communications Commission), Melissa Dunford (Formerly Federal Communications Commission), Gary M. Epstein (Formerly Federal Communications Commission), Charles E. Meisch (Formerly Federal Communications Commission), Jr., Karla L. Hoffman (George Mason University), Brian B. Smith (NCI Information Systems, Inc.), Anthony Coudert (NCI Information Systems, Inc.), Rudy K. Sultana (NCI Information Systems, Inc.), James A. Costa (Grubhub), Steven Charbonneau (Incentive Technology Group), Michael Trick (Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar), Ilya Segal (Stanford University), Kevin Leyton-Brown (University of British Columbia), Alexandre Fréchette (University of British Columbia), Neil Newman (University of British Columbia), Dinesh Menon (Marriott International), and Paul Salasznyk (Emprata, LLC)

"Pay-for-Quality or Pay-for-Selection? An Analysis of the Capitation Payment Models in Healthcare," by Zhaowei She (Georgia Tech), Turgay Ayer (Georgia Tech), and Daniel Montanera (Georgia State)

"Political Districting with Fairness Objectives: An Optimization-Based Multilevel Approach," by Rahul Swamy, Douglas M. King, and Sheldon H. Jacobson (UIUC)

2017 Best Paper Award Winners

The winners of the seventh PSOR best paper competition were announced at the PSOR business meeting at the 2017 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Houston. 

The judging committee included:

  • Pnina Feldman, UC Berkeley (chair)
  • Karan Girotra, INSEAD
  • Jonas Johasson, MIT
  • Diwas KC, Emory
  • Ravi Subramanian, Georgia Tech

The awardees were:

First Place

“Jumping the Line, Charitably: Analysis and Remedy of Donor-Priority Rule,” by Ronghuo Zheng (UT Austin), Tinglong Dai (Johns Hopkins), and Katia Sycara (Carnegie Mellon)

Second Place

“Data Analytics for Optimal Detection of Metastatic Prostate Cancer,” by Selin Merdan, Christine Barnett, Brian Denton, James Montie, and David Miller (University of Michigan)

Finalists

“Assessing the Quality of Quality Assessment: The Role of Scheduling,” by Maria Ibanez and Michael Toffel (Harvard Business School)
“Improving U.S. Marines’ Hurricane Preparation with the Hurricane Decision Simulator,” by Eva Ragnier (Naval Postgraduate School) and Cameron MacKenzie (Iowa State)

2016 PSOR Best Paper Award Winners

The winners of the sixth PSOR best paper competition were announced at the PSOR business meeting at the 2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Nashville. 

The judging committee included:

  • Muer Yang, Opus College of Business, University of St Thomas (chair)
  • Carri Chan, Columbia Business School, Columbia University
  • Michael Fry, Carl H. Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati
  • Elisa Long, Anderson School of Management, UCLA
  • Jeffrey Ohlmann, Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa

The awardees were:

First Place

"Improving Societal Outcomes in the Organ Donation Value Chain", Priyank Arora, Ravi Subramanian (Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology)

Second Place

"Welfare Implications of Congestion Pricing: Evidence from Sfpark", Pnina Feldman (Haas School of Business, University of California), Jun Li (Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan), Hsin-Tien Tsai (Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley)

Honorable Mention

"Optimal liver cancer surveillance in hepatitis C-infected population", Qiushi Chen, Turgay Ayer (The H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology), Jagpreet Chhatwal (Harvard Medical School)

2015 PSOR Best Paper Award Winners

The winners of the fifth PSOR best paper competition were announced at the PSOR business meeting at the 2015 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.

The judging committee included:

  • Alex Mills, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University (chair)
  • Gemma Berenguer, Krannert School of Management, Purdue University
  • Sarang Deo, Indian School of Business
  • Murat Kurt, Merck
  • Nan Liu, Mailman school of Public Health, Columbia University

The awardees were:

First Place

Shivam Gupta, Milind Dawande, Ganesh Janakiraman and Ashutosh Sarkar, “Distressed selling by farmers: Model, analysis, and use in policy-making”

Second Place

Eike Nohdurft, Elisa Long and Stefan Spinler, “Efficient spatial allocation of epidemic crisis intervention resources with a focus on Ebola in West Africa”

Honorable Mention

Na Li, Nan Kong, Quanlin Li and Zhibin Jiang, “Operational performance evaluation of reverse referral partnership in the Chinese healthcare system”

Finalists

Julia Moline, Jarrod Goentzel and Erica Gralla, “A Comparison of three models for opening and siting FEMA’s Disaster Recovery Centers”

Sam Aflaki, Shadi Goodarzi and Andrea Masini, “Optimal Feed-in-tariff Policies: The Role of Technology Providers”

2014 Best Paper Award Winners

The winners of the fourth PSOR best paper competition were announced at the PSOR business meeting at the 2014 INFORMS Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

The judging committee included:

  • Itai Ishlagi, MIT Sloan (chair)
  • Jason Acimovic, Penn State University
  • Benjamin Armbruster, Northwestern University
  • Hugh Medal, Mississippi State University
  • Shan Liu, University of Washington

The awardees were:

First Place

Monica Gentili, Nicoleta Serban and Julie L. Swann, "What are the areas in need for improving spatial access to pediatric primary care?"

Second Place 

Alex F. Mills, Jonathan E. Helm and Yu Wang, "SURGE: Smoothing usage of resource is good for emergencies"

Honorable Mention

Yan Deng, Siqian Shen and Brian Denton, "Chance-Constrained Surgery Planning under Uncertain or Ambiguous Surgery Durations"

Finalist

Hasan Manzour and Suleyman Karabuk, "Evacuation management under hazardous convective weather events"

2013 Best Paper Award Winners

The winners of the third SPPSN best paper competition were announced at the SPPSN business meeting at the 2013 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Minneapolis.

The judging committee included:

  • Jérémie Gallien, London Business School, chair
  • Julie Swann, Georgia Tech, chair
  • Atalay Atasu, Georgia Tech
  • Jonathan Helm, Indiana University
  • Natalie Privett, NYU

There were thirteen entrants, five invitations to the final round, and four finalists selected. The awardees were:

First Place

Peng Shi and Itai Ashlagi, "Optimal Allocation of Public Services Without Monetary Transfers or Costly Signals"

Second Place 

Edieal Pinker and Tolga Tezcan, "Determining the Optimal Configuration of Hospital Inpatient Rooms in the Presence of Isolation Patients

Honorable Mention

Armagan Bayram and Senay Solak, "Offer or No Offer: Managing Foreclosed Housing Acquisitions in Societal Response to Foreclosures"

Weihong Hu, Mariel Lavieri, Alejandro Toriello, and Xiang Liu, "Strategic Health Workforce Planning"

2012 Best Paper Award Winners

The winners of the second SPPSN best paper competition were announced at the SPPSN business meeting at the 2012 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix.

The judging committee included:

  • Michael Johnson, University of Massachusetts Boston, chair
  • Julie Swann, Georgia Institute of Technology, chair
  • Renata Konrad, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
  • Jun Zhuang, University of Buffalo
  • Michael Fry, University of Cincinnati

The awardees were:

First place

Jeremie Gallien, Zachary Leung, and Prashant Yadav, "Rationality and Transparency in the Distribution of Essential Drugs in Sub-Saharan Africa: Analysis and Design of an Inventory Control System for Zambia"

Second place

Timothy Chan, Derya Demirtas, and Roy H. Kwon, "Optimizing the Deployment of Public Access Defibrillators"

Honorable Mention

Prem Swaroop and Michael O. Ball, "A Consensus-Building Mechanism for Setting Service Expectations in Air Traffic Flow Management"

Luyi Gui, Atalay Atasu, Ozlem Ergun, and L. Beril Toktay, "Fair and Efficient Implementation of Collective Extended Producer Responsibility Legislation"

Finalists

Krishnan Anand and Francois Giraud-Carrier, "Pollution Regulation and Production"

Douglas King, Sheldon H. Jacobson, and Edward C. Sewell, "The Geo-Graph in Practice: Creating United States Congressional Districts from Census Blocks"

2011 Best Paper Award Winners

The first SPPSN best paper competition took place in the months leading up to the INFORMS 2011 national conference in Charlotte. There were 15 submissions and five finalists. The awardees were:

First place

Carri W. Chan, Linda V. Green, Yina Lu, Nicole Leahy and Roger Yurt, “Triage of Burn-Injured Patients in a Catastrophic Scenario”

Second place

Muer Yang, Theodore T. Allen, Michael J. Fry and W. David Kelton, “Using Operations Research to Improve Voting Systems”

Finalists

Morgan Doty, Bryce Dykes, Kathleen Hendrix, Ralph Long, Dana Lupuloff, Doug Meagh, Jeffrey Phillips, Julie Swann and Michael Vallecoccia, “Gwinnett County Public Schools: OR/MS Drives Improvements in Bus Logistics”

Jessica L. Heier Stamm, Nicoleta Serban and Julie Swann, “Quantifying and Explaining Access to H1N1 Vaccine”

Awards were presented at the SPPSN business meeting at INFORMS Charlotte. The judging committee was:

  • Michael Johnson, University of Massachusetts Boston, SPPSN president and committee chair
  • Karen Smilowitz, Northwestern University
  • John Hall, National Fire Protection Association
  • Vicki Sauter, University of Missouri – St. Louis
  • Julie Ivy, North Carolina State University