UCL School of Management faculty members Gizem Korpeoglu and Ersin Korpeoglu have seen their latest paper make it to the final of the INFORMS TIMES Best Working Paper Award.

TIMES is the Technology, Innovation Management, and Entrepreneurship Section within INFORMS, which is the leading international association for Operations Research & Management Science professionals.

Research Associate Gizem and Lecturer (assistant professor) Ersin, are currently working on their paper entitled ‘Contest among contest organizers,’ which studies multiple parallel contests where contest organizers elicit solutions to innovation-related problems from a set of agents.

Gizem and Ersin show that when organizers elicit innovative solutions rather than low-novelty solutions, agents’ participation in multiple contests may be beneficial to organizers. They further show that an organizer’s profit is unimodal in the number of contests, and the optimal number of contests increases with the agent’s output uncertainty.

This finding may explain why many organizations run multiple contests in practice, and it prescribes a larger number of contests when organizations seek innovative solutions rather than low-novelty solutions.

After being blindly read by three independent reviewers, their paper has been judged by TIMES to be one of the five best working papers in their category in 2018, and the paper will now be placed in the final.

They will find out whether their paper is the best at the INFORMS Conference TIMES Business Meeting on 5 November.