OPIM

On the Brink: Predicting Business Failure with Mobile Location-based Checkins.

Posted on by Nancy White

Decision Support Systems, 2015.

Joseph Pancras (Marketing). Co-authors: Ram Gopal (OPIM), Ramesh Shankar (OPIM), Lei Wang (Penn State University)

Consumers are increasingly using mobile services for engaging with firms in the offline world both directly through purchases and loyalty points redemptions, and indirectly through mobile gamification portals related to the retail outlet. One major such portal is Foursquare, the location-based service provider, which has been gaining popularity in the last few years. Continue Reading

Ackerman Faculty Scholars Announced

Posted on by Claire Hall

Five faculty members from the School of Business have been named Ackerman Scholars for academic years 2015-2017. They are: John Phillips of Accounting, Rex Santerre of Finance, Greg Reilly of Management, Girish Punj of Marketing and Bob Day of Operations and Information Management (OPIM).

Continuing from last year, for academic year 2015-2016, are: Qing Cao and Gary Powell of Management and Xue Bai, Jose Cruz and Suresh Nair of OPIM.

The Ackerman Scholar award recognizes significant and continuing all-round academic productivity among the faculty of the School, said Sulin Ba, associate dean of academic and research support. It is awarded to faculty who are not already supported by endowed chair, professorship, scholarship or fellowship appointments. The award is supported by the Ackerman Fund, the School of Business and the departments.

 

Going Once, Going Twice…

Posted on by Claire Hall

auction

OPIM Professor Robert Day’s Combinatorial Auction Algorithm Employed Throughout Europe, Canada in Billion-Dollar Bidding Deals

When the Canadian government wanted to apportion mobile broadband services in February 2014—so that there would be plenty of cell-phone coverage, competitive prices and more provider options nationwide—it used an algorithm devised by UConn Business Professor Bob Day and his colleagues.

Day, a professor of Operations and Information Management in the School of Business, is an expert in combinatorial auctions. His services have been called upon by the governments in Canada and England, who have collected over $8 billion in auction revenues for just two projects he worked on in 2013 and 2014.Continue Reading

Eight Outstanding School of Business Professors Earn 2015 Faculty Awards

Posted on by Claire Hall

A professor who used chocolate chip cookies to teach about quality control, three researchers who had work published in top journals, and an educator who vigorously promoted the School of Business were among the 2015 Faculty Award recipients.

“This year we honored eight outstanding faculty members for their exceptional research, teaching and leadership achievements,” said Associate Dean Sulin Ba. “The selection process was particularly difficult due to the dozens of impressive nominees. We are fortunate to have such talented, creative and remarkable colleagues.”Continue Reading

David Bergman Receives Prestigious Association for Constraint Programming Doctoral Thesis Award

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David BergmanDavid Bergman, an assistant professor of Operations and Information Management in the School of Business, has been selected as the winner of this year’s Association for Constraint Programming Doctoral Thesis Award.
The annual award is given to a researcher who has completed his/her thesis in the area of constraint programming. Bergman will present his thesis at this year’s 20th International Conference on Principles and Practices of Constraint Programming in Lyon, France, in September.

Bergman’s thesis is titled, “New Techniques for Discrete Optimization,” and it explores new methodological approaches to discrete optimization problems, an area of operations research which finds an increasing number of applications in fields such as finance, healthcare, and logistics, to name just a few. His thesis provides both theoretical insights and important algorithmic discoveries which together improve upon existing state-of-the-art technology.

He completed his Ph.D. in 2013 at Carnegie Mellon University in Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization, a joint program administered by the Tepper School of Business, the Department of Mathematical Sciences, and the Computer Science Department. Bergman’s thesis advisors were John N. Hooker and Willem-Jan van Hoeve.

An abstract of “New Techniques for Discrete Optimization” is available here.

OPIM Research Productivity Ranked Among the Best Worldwide

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UConn’s Operations & Information Management Department was recently ranked among the best business schools internationally—and #1 in the Northeast—for information systems research productivity over the last five years.

“These rankings are a clear indicator that we have one of the top research faculty groups in the country and around the world,” said Ram Gopal, professor and department head of OPIM. “Some of the most cutting-edge research in areas such as intellectual property rights, healthcare IT, auction markets, and advanced analytics is going on right here at UConn.”Continue Reading

Paper Received Best IS Publication of the Year Award 2010

Posted on by Claire Hall

A paper co-written by faculty members of the University of Connecticut School of Business Department of Operations and Information Management has been nominated as the best ACM TMIS paper of 2010 and is also one out of five recipients of the Best IS Publications of the Year Awards 2010.  The paper, titled “Why Give Away Something for Nothing? Investigating Virtual Goods Pricing and Permission Strategies,” was co-written in December 2010 by Dr. Sulin Ba, Professor; Dr. Dan Ke; Dr. Jan Stallaert, Associate Professor; and Zhongju Zhang, Associate Professor.

The Best Publications Awards were established to recognize the breadth of high quality work that is being published in the Information Systems discipline. This award was designed to bring outstanding papers across a range of journals to the attention of the IS community, and to give due credit to the journals in which they are published. Each year journal editors nominate the best paper published in their journal in the preceding year. A committee composed of Senior Scholars reviews the nominations from journal editors and selects five papers as the recipients of this prestigious award.

“Why Give Away Something for Nothing? Investigating Virtual Goods Pricing and Permission Strategies” is about the world of virtual goods.  The question of how a creator sets prices for a virtual good, as to maximize their profit, is discussed.  The major difference with virtual goods is that many times consumers will want to use multiple copies of the same good, which results in an increase in the consumer’s utility.  The focus of the research is on the copy permission of virtual goods.  An economic model is developed and examined under different conditions, to find which setting is best for the copy permission that leads to the highest profit, as well as how subsequent pricing strategies are affected.  Both theoretical and practical implications of researched are discussed within the paper.