Informs Annual Meeting Phoenix 2018

INFORMS Phoenix – 2018

TB13

n TB12 North Bldg 126A Crowdfunding Sponsored: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt Sponsored Session Chair: Michael R. Wagner, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States 1 - Signaling to the Crowd: Private Quality Information and Rewards-based Crowdfunding Soudipta Chakraborty, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States, Robert Swinney We consider the problem faced by a creator designing a rewards-based crowdfunding campaign via a platform like Kickstarter. The creator solicits pledges from backers, and if total pledges exceed a pre-determined threshold, the campaign is successful, the creator receives all pledges and each backer receives a reward. Otherwise, the campaign fails and backers are refunded their pledges. We determine how the creator should design her crowdfunding campaign when backers know less than her about the value of the reward. 2 - Referral Timing and Fundraising Success in Crowdfunding Diwakar Gupta, McCombs School of Business, Austin, TX, United States, Gordon Burtch Entrepreneurs frequently leverage social contacts to generate traffic to a crowdfunding campaign. Considering campaign fundraising progress, we address the question of exactly when an entrepreneur should involve his or her social connections. The optimal strategy depends on whether the rich-get-richer or the crowding-out effect dominates contributor behavior after observing prior capital accumulation. We also report on a number of simulation analyses which speak to heterogeneity in the efficacy of the optimal referral policy under different situations, e.g., in the presence of seed money. 3 - Crowdfunding via Revenue-sharing Contracts Soraya Fatehi, University of Washington, Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington, 358 Mackenzie Hall, Seattle, WA, 98195-3200, United States We present a new model of crowdfunding where a platform acts as a matchmaker between a firm needing funds and a crowd of investors willing to provide capital. Once the firm is funded, it pays back the investors using revenue sharing contracts. The firm determines its optimal contract parameters to maximize its expected net present value (NPV), subject to investor participation constraints and platform fees. Parametrized on real data from Bolstr.com, we show that revenue- sharing contracts provide a higher NPV and a lower probability of bankruptcy than equity crowdfunding or a fixed-rate loan, for all levels of cash-flow uncertainty. 4 - Does Crowdfunding Benefit Entrepreneurs and Venture Capital Investors? Volodymyr Babich, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, United States, Simone Marinesi, Gerry Tsoukalas We study how crowdfunding interacts with traditional financing sources (VC and bank). We model a multi-stage bargaining game, with a moral-hazard problem between entrepreneurs and banks, and a double-sided moral-hazard between entrepreneurs and VCs. Economic value of crowdfunding is generally shared between entrepreneurs and investors, benefiting both. Furthermore, crowdfunding can alleviate underinvestment due to financial frictions problem for some projects. However, crowdfunding can also harm the entrepreneur and the VC. The model provides a theoretical underpinning for recent empirical observations that some projects lose VC financing after successful crowdfunding campaigns. 5 - Crowdfunding, Signaling, and Venture Capital Jussi Keppo, National University of Singapore, Mochtar Riady Building, BIZ 1 8-69, 15 Kent Ridge Drive, Singapore, 119245, Singapore, Ming Hu, Yannan Jin We study how venture capital (VC) investments are affected by crowdfunding platforms. We find that VCs utilize crowdfunding as a signaling device on the quality of startups. Therefore, in industries where the crowdfunding option is available, startups become more strategic and VCs are more likely to delay their investment decisions after observing the information from the crowdfunding platform. We link our findings to VC investment data.

n TB13 North Bldg 126B Behavioral OM in Healthcare Sponsored: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/Healthcare Operations Sponsored Session Chair: Mor Armony, New York University, New York, NY, 10012, United States Co-Chair: Nan Liu, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, 02467, United States 1 - Load Balancing in Multi-featured Multi-class Multi-skill Service Systems Nitzan Carmeli, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, Galit B. Yom-Tov, Avishai Mandelbaum Operational offered load, and its calculated agents utilization through queueing theory, support the design, staffing and routing of congestion-prone service systems. However, in many such systems, and healthcare in particular, agents experience additional features of load such as emotional and cognitive - these cause stress and fatigue even when the offered load is low. How does one balance such load among servers, in a way that accommodates its multi-features? In our research we develop a novel theoretical framework that supports answers to this question. More concretely, we consider a queueing system with skills-based routing, within which we optimally and fairly balance multi-feature load. 2 - Improving the Use of Operating Rooms Using Surgeon Input Song-Hee Kim, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States, Rouba Ibrahim When allocating operating room times to surgery cases, hospitals need to know how long the surgeries will take. Although the estimation of surgery case duration has been extensively studied, accurately predicting surgery case duration remains a challenge. We examine ways to systematically combine surgeons’ forecasts with a model based on observed attributes to improve the accuracy of surgery case duration predictions, and hence the use of operating rooms. 3 - Predicting Readmission Risk by Leveraging Connected Health Devices Tan Lekwijit, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 3730 Walnut St, Ste 500, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States, Christian Terwiesch, Kevin Volpp Hospital readmission of patients with chronic diseases is often viewed only as a sign of poor quality of care. However, a significant part of the risk can be attributed to the lack of medication adherence. We utilize daily adherence information obtained from electronic pill bottles and investigate the impact of long-term and short-term medication adherence in patients with coronary artery disease on the risk of readmission. We find that long-term adherence to Statin is associated with a 47% reduction in the likelihood of readmission on any given day. In an ongoing work, we are examining the impact of different levels of adherence interventions, such as messages, calls, and letters, on patient behavior. 4 - Withholding Capacity from Strategic Patients Yunchao Xu, New York University, New York, NY, 10012, United States, Mor Armony, Nan Liu Common wisdom suggests that everything else being equal, seeing patients sooner rather than later is preferable. In particular health outcomes improve with reduced delay and so does patient satisfaction. At the same time, if the delay in access to care is reduced, patients may be more inclined not to show up for their appointments given that rescheduling will not result in excessive wait. We investigate how an outpatient care provider should manage capacity in the presence of such strategic behavior of patients. We find that under some circumstances, it is optimal for the service provider to withhold capacity from patients in order to elicit them to show up for their scheduled appointments.

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