INFORMS Open Forum

Call for Papers: Marketplace Innovation Workshop, June 2020

  • 1.  Call for Papers: Marketplace Innovation Workshop, June 2020

    Posted 01-16-2020 09:25

    Sixth Marketplace Innovation Workshop

    Columbia University, New York, NY

    June 2-3, 2020

    http://marketplaceinnovation.net

    Submission deadline: February 21, 2020
    Submissions consist of extended abstracts (1 page) and submissions will be accepted starting next week.

    Organizers:

    Itai Ashlagi, Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University
    Omar Besbes, Columbia Business School, Columbia University
    Ilan Lobel, Stern School of Business, New York University
    Gabriel Weintraub, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University

    Description:

    Markets are an ancient institution for matching the supply for a good or service with its demand. Physical markets were typically slow to evolve, with simple institutions governing trade, and trading partners generally facing a daunting challenge in finding the "right" partner. The information technology revolution, however, has generated a sea of change in how markets function: now, markets are typically complex platforms, with a range of mechanisms involved in facilitating matches among participants. Recent trends point to an unprecedented level of control over the design, implementation, and operation of markets: more than ever before, we are able to engineer the platforms governing transactions among market participants. As a consequence, market operators or platforms can control a host of variables such as pricing, liquidity, visibility, information revelation, terms of trade, and transaction fees. On its part, given these variables, market participants often face complex problems when optimizing their own decisions. In the supply side such decisions may include the assortment of products to offer and their price structure, while in the demand side they may include how much to bid for different goods and what feedback to offer about past purchasing experiences. The decisions made by the platform and the market participants interact, sometimes in intricate and subtle ways, to determine market outcomes.

    This year we will be accepting contributed abstract submissions as part of the workshop program.  We seek work that improves our understanding of these markets, both from the perspective of the market operator and the market participants. With respect to the former we are particularly interested in work that derives useful insights on how to design these markets, taking into account their operational details and engineering and technological constraints. With respect to the market participants, we seek for work that introduces novel approaches to optimize their decisions and improves our understanding of their interactions within the market. We look for a mix of approaches including modeling, theoretical, and empirical, using a wide range of tools drawn from operations management, game theory, auctions and mechanism design, optimization, stochastic modeling, revenue management, econometrics, or statistics.

    The list of markets to be studied includes but it is not restricted to:
    -Online marketplaces, such as eBay, Etsy, etc.
    -Internet advertising, including sponsored search and display ad exchanges
    -Sharing economy markets, such as Uber/Lyft, AirBnb, etc.
    -Online labor markets, such as Amazon mTurk, Upwork, etc.
    -Procurement markets, such as technology-enabled government procurement
    -Health care exchanges
    -Financial exchanges



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    Omar Besbes                                 
    Columbia University, Graduate School of Business
    Decision, Risk & Operations division
    web: http://www.columbia.edu/~ob2105/
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