UCL School of Management faculty members Gizem and Ersin Korpeoglu have seen their latest paper finish as runner-up in the final of the INFORMS TIME Best Working Paper Award.​

TIME 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.

Their paper, along with all other submissions, were blindly read by three independent reviewers who subsequently chose a shortlist of five papers to make it to the final.

Of the five papers in the final, Gizem and Ersin’s paper was judged to have been the second best, which is a fantastic result.