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When Should I Transfer This Customer?

“Please hold while I transfer you to next level of support.” Most of us have been on the receiving end of this message. In this study, the authors look at transfers from the service worker’s perspective. They create an ...

In many service encounters, frontline workers (often referred to as gatekeepers) have the discretion to attempt to resolve a customer request or to transfer the customer to an expert service provider. Motivated by an incentive redesign at a call center of ...

Explaining and Resolving Delays in Projects

Project management is responsible for 30% of the world’s economic activity, with an annual value of $27 trillion. Yet, despite half a century of research and the training of millions of project managers, many ...

Project management is responsible for almost 30% of the world’s economic activity, with an annual value of $27 trillion. Traditionally, the frequent late delivery of projects is attributed to Parkinson’s Law, which incorporates laziness, procrastination, ...

This paper explores how loss-framed incentives affect behavior in a multitasking environment in which participants have more than one way of recovering (expected) losses. In a real-effort laboratory experiment, we offer participants task incentives that ...

Traffic congestion has become a serious issue around the globe, partly owing to single-occupancy commuter trips. Ridesharing can present a suitable alternative for serving commuter trips. However, there are several important obstacles that impede ...

Critical sectors of human society are progressing toward the adoption of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) agents, which are trained individually on behalf of self-interested principals but deployed in a shared environment. Short of direct ...

People tend to behave inconsistently over time due to an inherent present bias. As this may impair performance, social and economic settings need to be adapted accordingly. Common tools to reduce the impact of time-inconsistent behavior are penalties ...

Increasingly large trip demands have strained urban transportation capacity, which consequently leads to traffic congestion and rapid growth of greenhouse gas emissions. In this work, we focus on achieving sustainable transportation by incentivizing ...

Based on incentive design, this paper studies a type of task assignment problem in the context of virtual enterprise. We propose a multi-type task assignment model with the optimization objectives of total profit, task execution cost and time, which ...

In this paper, we use mobile messaging to leverage recipients’ social ties and encourage offline prosocial activities in groups. In particular, we conduct a randomized field experiment with 80,000 blood donors and study how behavioral interventions and ...

Many real-world systems such as taxi systems, traffic networks and smart grids involve self-interested actors that perform individual tasks in a shared environment. However, in such systems, the self-interested behaviour of agents produces welfare ...

We investigated whether shoutengai, old shopping districts in Japan, can be revitalized by solving the disparity problem in the number of customers among shoutengai according to their location and by solving the problem of inequality in popularity among ...

We consider the problem of designing a robust credit score function in the context of online discussion forums. Credit score function assigns a real-valued credit score to each participant based on activities on the forum. A credit score of a ...

Electrical utilities offer incentives to their customers to reduce their demand during temporary supply-demand mismatches. While customers would prefer a higher incentive to participate, utilities would prefer to minimize the incentive while achieving a ...

Online referral systems help firms attract new customers and expand their customer base by leveraging the social relationships of existing customers. We integrate ultimatum game theory, which focuses on fairness, with motivation theories to investigate ...

My thesis focuses on understanding and influencing the behavior and performance of users in large scale task systems. In task systems, multiple participants work independently to solve problems that are presented to them by a computer. From e-learning ...

Utility companies have many motivations for modifying energy consumption patterns of consumers such as revenue decoupling and demand response programs. We model the utility company-consumer interaction as a principal-agent problem and present an ...

Designing incentives to shape user behavior in line with system goals is a precarious feat. These goals can be diverse, ranging from user retention to streamlining content creation. Yet there is no playbook available in the art to be applied on such ...

Information markets benefit the communities they serve by facilitating electronic distributed exchange and enhancing knowledge sharing, innovation, and productivity. This research explores innovative market mechanisms to build incentives while ...

The evaluation system in e-commerce plays an important role when buying products. However, hitherto known evaluation systems are problems regarding incomplete and asymmetric information. We propose a new evaluation model and conduct assessment ...

We present the design, implementation and evaluation of a new geotagging service, Gloe, that makes it easy to find, rate and recommend arbitrary on-line content in a mobile setting. The service automates the content search process by taking advantage of ...