Papers co-authored by Soo-Haeng Cho and Alan Scheller-Wolf earned best paper recognitions during the INFORMS annual meeting.
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences held its annual meeting this fall, where Tepper School of Business researchers were recognized with several awards for their work. Included in these accolades was an IBM Best Student Paper Award from the Section on Service Science for a paper authored by Neda Mirzaeian, a Ph.D. student at the Tepper School, and Tepper faculty members Soo-Haeng Cho, Associate Professor of Operations Management, and Alan Scheller-Wolf, Richard M. Cyert Professor of Operations Management, Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Research. Another paper co-authored by Cho and Scheller-Wolf earned a Best Working Paper Award from the INFORMS Technology, Innovation Management, and Entrepreneurship Section.
IBM Best Student Paper
The INFORMS Section on Service Science focuses on interdisciplinary research that benefits the service sector. The section's IBM Best Student Paper competition is sponsored by IBM Research, a research lab exploring advancements in AI, blockchain, and quantum computing. Mirzaeian, the lead author on the winning paper, said, "We believed that our paper had the potential to be widely recognized in our society, and the IBM competition provided a prestigious and well-known means to satisfy this purpose."
"A Queuing Model and Analysis for Autonomous Vehicles on Highways" explores how autonomous vehicles may help to alleviate highway congestion, finding that recently proposed policies to set a designated lane for AVs is ineffective at reducing congestion in most practical cases. AVs can travel more closely together than human-operated vehicles, so integrating them into all traffic lanes allows more cars to travel at one time. "I believe the novelty and salience of our work contributed to its selection," Mirzaeian said. "We utilized a well-established methodology, which is called queuing theory, to model a nascent topic."
Mirzaeian, Cho, and Scheller-Wolf's paper was chosen from among 14 finalists, including one from Tepper School Ph.D. student Kyra Gan. "I was honored and humbled to have been selected as the winner of this prestigious competition. It was truly heartwarming to be recognized for the research that I am so passionate about," Mirzaeian said.
"This recognition demonstrates the significant potential our research has to impact a real problem our society is facing," Cho said. "I am glad to see that INFORMS has honored Neda and her work in this way."
TIMES Best Working Paper
Xin Wang (Ph.D. 2016), Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology whom Cho and Scheller-Wolf co-advised during his doctoral studies at the Tepper School, was the lead author on "Green Technology Development and Adoption: Competition, Regulation, and Uncertainty — A Global Game Approach," which earned Best Working Paper from the INFORMS Technology, Innovation Management, and Entrepreneurship Section. TIMES is concerned with research in technology management, such as management of research and development, organizational change, strategy, and product development.
The winning paper, forthcoming in the journal Management Science, established a model for predicting how likely a stricter environmental standard will be adopted voluntarily by firms in affected industries. The likelihood is affected by how beneficial marketing about a new technology will be for the firm and how strict the enforcement of policy is. The researchers find that when regulators account for voluntary adoption, they can more effectively foster development of a new green technology.
A panel of experts evaluated research submissions on how innovative the papers were and how it might impact the theory and practice of technology management, product or process innovation, business model innovation, new product development, or entrepreneurship. "We are pleased that our research was recognized by TIMES as innovative and impactful work," Cho said. "The paper is significant because of the timeliness of a topic focused on sustainable business practices and the novelty of our model, which is based on a recently developed game framework in the field of economics."
