Awards

The goal of this Competition is to highlight the best working papers in the area of Behavioral Operations.

The awards will be given annually at the INFORMS Annual meeting and will recognize papers as follows:

• First prize (recognized with a virtual certificate, and a $500 prize)
• Second prize (recognized with a virtual certificate)
• 2 honorable mentions (recognized with a virtual certificate)

The award recipients will be invited to present their papers at a special session at the INFORMS Annual meeting.

Eligibility criteria

• A submission must be in the domain of behavioral operations. To be considered, papers need to meet three primary criteria: (a) at least potentially allow human decision makers to deviate from hyper-rational behavior; (b) examine behavior within an operations context; (c) focus on a micro-level of analysis.
• As of the date of submission the paper must not be accepted for publication. Also, the paper must not have been submitted to a prior INFORMS BOM Best Working Paper Competition unless it has been substantially revised from prior submission(s). 
• The format should be consistent with the manuscript preparation guidelines of Management Science or a similar journal if applicable. 
• At least one of the authors of the paper must be a member of the INFORMS BOM Section. If unsure how to join, see http://connect.informs.org/behavioral-operations-management/about-us/membership
• The authors of each submitted paper must agree to serve as “referees” for up to three other papers submitted for the Award.
• If in doubt on any of the eligibility criteria, please contact the Competition Committee Chair, Rafael Escamilla, at r.escamilla@tilburguniversity.edu.

Award recipients’ selection procedure

• Ultimately, the award recipients will be selected by a three-person Competition Committee, which consists of the Chair, Committee Member, and Honorary Committee Member.
• To inform its opinion, the Committee will seek up to three “referee” reports for each submission. The referees will be selected to minimize the conflict of interest with the authors and will include other BOM section members and/or researchers in this domain. To the extent possible, anonymous referee comments will be returned for each submission.
• If a submission has a substantial conflict of interest with a member of the awards committee, the other committee members will primarily handle the entry, assign referees and evaluate the submission. Should the submission be recommended as a finalist by the remaining two committee members, the BOM Section President (or designee) will assist in evaluating and/or ranking the finalists.   
• The 2023 Awards Committee is: 
  
  • Rafael Escamilla (Tilburg University), Competition Committee Chair
  • Anna Sáez de Tejada Cuenca (IESE Business School), Committee Member and Previous Chair
  • Yaozhong Wu (National University of Singapore), Honorary Committee Member
    
    
• The new Competition Committee Chair will be elected at the INFORMS BOM Section business meeting, and the current Chair will serve as next year’s committee member. You can contact the Competition Committee Chair at r.escamilla@tilburguniversity.edu with any questions.

Submission procedure

Submit your paper at https://survey.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_7PtpY7O5lkiawf4 with the following information: 

• Blinded PDF copy of your paper with all appendices, tables, graphs, etc.  
• Names of all authors, their email addresses and affiliations. 
• Names of 5 referees with whom the authors have minimal conflict of interest. Please exclude both the awards committee and BOM Section President. 

Deadline for submissions is June 16th, 2023 

2022 Best Working Paper Award Winners

On behalf of the awards committee, please join in congratulating the winners of the 2022 INFORMS Behavioral Operations Management Section Best Working Paper Award. The results were announced at the conclusion of a special presentation session at INFORMS 2022. Please join us in congratulating the following authors: 

• First place: Supplying Cash-Constrained Retailers: Understanding Shopkeeper Behavior at the Bottom of the Pyramid – by Sebastian Villa, Rafael Escamilla, and Jan Fransoo.

• Second place: Under-Promising and Over-Delivering to Improve Patient Satisfaction at Emergency Departments: Evidence from a Field Experiment Providing Wait Information – by Sina Ansari, Debo Laurens, María Ibáñez, Seyed M.R. Iravani, and Sanjeev Malik.
• Honorable mentions:
  • Disclosing Low Product Availability: An Online Retailer's Strategy for Mitigating Stockout Risk – by Dmitry Mitrofanov and Benjamin Knight.
  • Can Employees' Past Helping Behavior be Used to Improve Shift Scheduling? Evidence from ICU Nurses – by Zoey (Zhaohui) JIANG, John Silberholz, Yixin (Iris) Wang, Deena Kelly Costa, and Michael Sjoding.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all authors and judges who participated in this year's competition.

Previous winners

2021

The results were announced at the conclusion of a special presentation session at INFORMS 2021:

• First place: Learning Best Practices: Can Machine Learning Improve Human Decision-Making? – by Hamsa Bastani, Osbert Bastani, and Park Sinchaisri.
• Second place: On Customer (Dis)honesty in Priority Queues: The Role of Lying Aversion – by Rouba Ibrahim, Arturo Estrada Rodriguez, Dongyuan Zhan.
• Honorable mentions (we have three this year due to the record number of excellent submissions):
  • Wage Transparency, Negotiation, and Reference-dependent Utility – by Hengchen Dai, Xiaoyang Long, and Dennis Zhang.
  • To Earmark or Not to Earmark? The Role of Control, Transparency, Salience and Warm-Glow – by Özalp Özer, Gloria Urrea, and Sebastian Villa.
  • Delay Information in Virtual Queues: A Large-Scale Field Experiment on a Major Ride-Sharing Platform – by Qiuping Yu, Yiming Zhang, and Yong-Pin Zhou.

2020

The results were announced at the conclusion of a special presentation session at INFORMS 2020:

• First place: The Gatekeeper's Dilemma: "When Should I Transfer This Customer?" by Evgeny Kagan, Brett Hathaway, & Maqbool Dada
• Second place: To What Extent Do Workers’ Preferences Matter by Zhenzhen Jia, Kejia Hu, Jian-Qiang Hu, & Vishal Ahuja
• Honorable mentions (we have three this year due to the record number of excellent submissions):
  • Off-Grid Lighting Business Models to Serve the Poor: Evidence From a Structural Model and Field Experiments in Rwanda by Bhavani Shanker Uppari, Serguei Netessine, Ioana Popescu, & Clarke Rowan
  • Silent Abandonment in Contact Centers: Estimating Customer Patience from Uncertain Data by Antonio Castellanos, Galit Yom-Tov, & Yair Goldberg
  • A capacity allocation auction for sales and operations planning - Eliciting truthful information by Frank Hage, Sebastian Schiffels, & Martin Grunow

2019

The results were announced at the conclusion of a special presentation session at INFORMS 2019:

• First Place: Mitigating the Negative Effects of Customer Anxiety through Access to Human Contact Michelle Shell (Harvard University) & Ryan Buell (Harvard University)
• Second Place: Multi-Period Inventory Management with Budget Cycles: Rational and Behavioral Decision Making Michael Becker-Peth (RSM Erasmus), Kai Hoberg (KLU Hamburg), & Margarita Protopappa-Sieke (McKinsey & Company)
• Honorable Mention: The Impact of Behavioral and Economic Drivers on Gig Economy Workers Park Sinchaisri (University of Pennsylvania), Gad Allon (University of Pennsylvania), Maxime Cohen (NYU)

2018

The results were announced at the conclusion of a special presentation session at INFORMS 2018: 

• First Place: Private Information and Endogenous Matching in Supply Chains Andrew Davis (Cornell University) & Kyle Hyndman (UT Dallas)
• Second Place: Increased Transparency in Procurement: The Role of Peer Effects Ruth Beer (Indiana University), Ignacio Rios (Stanford University), & Daniela Saban (Standford University)
• Honorable Mention:  From Noise to Bias in Linked Supply Chain Decisions Daniel Fuller (Dartmouth) & Jordan Tong (University of Wisconsin)

2017

The results were announced at the conclusion of a special presentation session at INFORMS 2017: 

• First Place: Ruomeng Cui, Jun Li, and Dennis Zhang: Discrimination with Incomplete Information in the Shared Economy: Evidence from Field Experiments on Airbnb
• Second Place: Bhavani Shanker Uppari and Sameer Hasija: Modeling Newsvendor Behavior: A Prospect Theory Approach
• Honorable Mention:  Eric Park, Yichuan Ding, Mahesh Nagarajan, and Eric Grafstein: Patient Prioritization in Emergency Department Triage Systems: An Empirical Study of Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS)
  

2016

The results were announced at the conclusion of a special presentation session at INFORMS 2016:

• First Place: A Behavioral Study on Abandonment Decisions in Multi-Stage Projects by Javad Nasiry (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Xiaoyang Long (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), and Yaozhong Wu (National University of Singapore)
• Second Place: Impact of Queue Configuration on Service Time: Evidence from a Supermarket by Jingqi Wang (University of Hong Kong) and Yong-Pin Zhou (University of Washington, Seattle)
• Honorable Mention:  Ideation-Execution Transition in Product Development by Evgeny Kagan (University of Michigan Ross School of Business), Stephen Leider (University of Michigan Ross School of Business) and William Lovejoy (University of Michigan Ross School of Business)

2015

The results were announced at the conclusion of a special presentation session at INFORMS 2015:

• First Place: Bargaining Process and Channel Efficiency by Ernan Haruvy (University of Texas at Dallas), Elena Katok (University of Texas at Dallas), and Valery Pavlov (University of Auckland)
• Second Place: Transparency and Indirect Reciprocity in Social Responsibility: An Incentivized Experiment by Tim Kraft (University of Virginia), Leon Valdes (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Yanchong Zheng (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Honorable Mention: Learning From the Best: The Effects of Public Relative Performance Feedback on Variability and Productivity by Hummy Song (Harvard University), Anita L. Tucker (Brandeis University), Karen L. Murrell (Kaiser Permanente), and David Vinson (Kaiser Permanente)

2014

Results were announced on Nov. 9, 2014 during the INFORMS BOM Best Working Paper Presentation session at INFORMS Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Congratulations to all finalists. 

• First Place: Designing Incentive Systems for Truthful Demand Information Sharing– Theory and Experiment by Lisa M. Scheele, Marco Slikker and Ulrich W. Thonemann
• Second Place: Capacity Investment in Supply Chains: Contracts and the Hold-up Problem by Andrew Davis and Stephen Leider
• Honorable Mention: Remanufacturing, Third-Party Competition, and Consumers' Perceived Value of New Products by Vishal Agrawal, Atalay Atasu and Koert van Ittersum

2013

Results were announced on Oct. 6, 2013, 2014 during the INFORMS BOM Best Working Paper Presentation session at INFORMS Annual Meeting.

• First Place: Waiting Patiently: An Empirical Study of Queue Abandonment in an Emergency Department Robert Batt & Christian Terwiesch
• Runner Up: Trust, Trustworthiness and Information Sharing in Supply Chains Bridging China and the U.S. Ozalp Ozer, Yufei Ren, & Yanchong Zheng
• Honorable Mention: The Design of Experiential Services: Optimal Sequence and Duration of Service Activities Aparupa Das Gupta, Uday Karmarkar, & Guillaume Roels

Congratulations to all.