Parallel Innovation Contests
Asst. Prof. Dr. Ersin Körpeoğlu
University College London, School of Management
Nov 8, 1:40 p.m.
EA-409
We study multiple parallel contests where contest organizers elicit solutions to innovation-related problems from a set of agents. Each agent may participate in multiple contests and exert effort to improve her solution for each contest she enters, but the quality of her solution also depends on an output uncertainty. We first analyze whether an organizer’s profit can be improved by discouraging agents from participating in multiple contests. We show, interestingly, that organizers benefit from agents’ participation in multiple contests when the agent’s output uncertainty is sufficiently large. A managerial insight from this result is that when organizers elicit innovative solutions rather than low-novelty solutions, agents’ participation in multiple contests may be beneficial to organizers. We 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.
Dr Ersin Korpeoglu is an Assistant Professor at University College London, School of Management. He received his PhD in Operations Management from Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University in 2015. He also holds an MS in Manufacturing & Operations Management from Tepper School and an MS in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University. He received his BS degree in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University.
Dr Korpeoglu's current research focuses on economic models of operations with applications to innovation and supply chain management. He is interested in application areas including open innovation, crowdsourcing, and the impact of competition on innovation and supply chain management. He utilizes economic and statistical models such as auction theory, mechanism design, competition models (e.g., contests, market game), and extreme value theory. Dr Korpeoglu's work has been published in leading operations journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, M&SOM, and Interfaces. He is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) and Production and Operations Management Society (POMS), and a recipient of the first prize in 2016 INFORMS Technology, Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship Section (TIMES) Best Doctoral Dissertation Competition and the second prize in 2018 INFORMS TIMES Best Working Paper Competition.
