INFORMS Open Forum

Reminder: October 1 is the submission deadline for the MSOM Special Issue on "Sharing Economy and Innovative Marketplaces."

  • 1.  Reminder: October 1 is the submission deadline for the MSOM Special Issue on "Sharing Economy and Innovative Marketplaces."

    Posted 09-15-2018 12:31

    M&SOM Special Issue on Sharing Economy and Innovative Marketplaces

    Co-Editors

    Saif Benjaafar

    Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, saif@umn.edu

    Ming Hu

    Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, ming.hu@rotman.utoronto.ca

    This M&SOM special issue will focus on the challenges and opportunities arising from sharing economy business models and related innovative marketplaces.  There has been rapid growth in business models built around digital platforms that bring together buyers and sellers to interact and trade in new and innovative ways.  Some of these platforms have been successful in overcoming the inefficiencies of peer-to-peer interactions by reducing transaction and search costs, facilitating payments, reducing moral hazard, and enabling trust among strangers.  Others have been successful in reducing the costs of providing services on demand by harnessing economies of scale, tapping into idle assets, or leveraging the crowd.  This has also led to the adoption of business models of products as services built around the selling of a product's functionality instead of the product itself.

    We seek papers that study the operation, economics, and practice of such innovative business models and marketplaces.  We are open to papers that utilize a variety of methodologies, including analytical, empirical, and behavioral approaches.  We are also open to papers that explore a variety of research questions, including those that examine the impact of sharing economy on production, consumption, and social welfare, that explore the intermediary role of a platform matching supply with demand, and that investigate context-based operational problems of leading platforms.  We are especially interested in papers that are clearly motivated and informed by industry challenges and practices.  Examples of applications include but are not limited to shared transportation and shared logistics, peer-to-peer trading and e-commerce, labor platforms and platforms for professional services, crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, and cloud computing and other cloud services.

    Timeline and Process

    • Deadline for submission: October 1, 2018
    • First-round decision and feedback: February 1, 2019
    • Second-round submission (for those papers invited to revise): May 1, 2019
    • Final decisions (subject to minor revisions): August 1, 2019
    Authors wondering whether a current research project is a fit for the special issue are invited to email a short description (no more than one page) of their project to the co-editors.  We will provide feedback on whether the topic meets the goals of the special issue.  We will not evaluate the quality of the research based on the description.  That determination will be left to the review process.  There is no requirement to submit a description before submitting a paper.

    ------------------------------
    Saif Benjaafar
    Distinguished McKnight University Professor
    University of Minnesota
    Minneapolis MN
    ------------------------------