Dear Colleagues and Friends,
With the Spring break a few weeks ahead, I would like to take a moment and highlight the success of the Management Science's community in driving innovations and making an impact on theory and practice. Indeed, I am proud of papers published by Management Science, many of which are theoretically elegant and practically insightful.
In this blog, I will highlight one example, the paper "Optimal Matchmaking Strategy in Two-Sided Marketplaces", Peng Shi, Management Science, 2023, Volume 69, Issue 3. The paper is focused on online platforms that help customers find suitable service providers and utilize a wide variety of matchmaking strategies. Platforms apply strategies such as "customers search" (Airbnb, Google Maps); "providers search" (Amazon Mechanical Turk and Bark); "both sides search" (Care.com, Upwork and Yelp); and "centralized matching" (Amazon Home Services, Angi, HomeAdvisor). The paper develops a theoretical framework that provides insights into the efficiency of the four matchmaking strategies. I asked two economists, Professor Federico Echenique (Berkeley) and Professor Fuhito Kojima (University of Tokyo) to reflect on the importance and contributions of this research. You can read their perspectives in the blog page of the journal.
The impact of Management Science on future research and practice can also be seen by looking at the large data sets and code assembled by the journal, see here. These data sets and code are collected to assure the availability of the material necessary to replicate the research published in the journal, see Management Science's Data and Code Disclosure Policy here.
A secondary benefit of this policy is to advance the research in fields covered by the journal. Inevitably, the sharing of data and codes will be of value to the relevant research community, informing their own research pursuits.
I would like to draw your attention to a new initiative, the Management Science Reproducibility Project. In this project, we aim to quantify the reproducibility of results published in Management Science articles before and after the new Data and Code Disclosure Policy came into effect.
The project is well underway. Almost 500 articles and their replication packages will be reviewed, some of them twice. Since the beginning of February 2023, more than 700 researchers have accepted their review assignment as members of the initiative, and almost 150 reports have already been submitted. We hope to finish the review phase in the first half of 2023 and be able to share the results after summer.
David Simchi-Levi
Editor-in-Chief
Management Science
E-mail: mseic@mit.edu
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David Simchi-Levi
Professor of Engineering Systems
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge MA
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