IE Seminar: “Optimal Duration of Innovation Contests,” Dr. Gizem Körpeoğlu ( University College London School of Management), EA-309, 1:40PM December 28 (EN)

Title: Optimal Duration of Innovation Contests

Dr. Gizem Körpeoğlu
Department of Operations and Technology
University College London School of Management
December 28, Friday, 13 :40
Place: EA 409

This paper studies the optimal duration and the optimal award scheme of an innovation contest where an organizer elicits solutions to an innovation-related problem from a group of agents. Each agent can improve her solution by exerting costly effort but the quality of her solution also depends on an output uncertainty. We show, consistent with recent empirical evidence, that the optimal contest duration and the optimal total award increase with the agent’s output uncertainty and decrease with the marginal impact of the agent’s effort on the quality of her solution. A managerial insight from this result is that the optimal contest duration may increase with the novelty and the sophistication of solutions that the organizer seeks. More interestingly, we show that it is optimal for the organizer to give multiple awards when the organizer has low urgency in obtaining solutions. This result may explain why many contests on platforms give multiple awards.
Dr. Gizem Körpeoğlu in a postdoctoral fellow of Operations and Technology at University College London School of Management. She received her PhD from Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. She also holds an MS degree from Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and a BS degree from Middle East Technical University.
Dr. Gizem Körpeoğlu is an applied theorist who studies operational problems in innovative business models, innovation management, and supply chain economics. During her PhD, she has studied market methodologies such as mechanism design without money and oligopolistic competition. During her postdoc, she has utilized her methodological knowledge to address operational problems arising from strategic interactions among firms and between firms, freelancers, and customers. Recently, she has been studying online platforms, which are marketplaces that facilitate transactions between various buyers and sellers. In addition to online platforms, she has been working on developing a competition model based on the market-game mechanism that she studied in her PhD thesis. She is the recipient of the second prize at INFORMS TIMES best working paper award.