Recent, Ongoing, and Future Research Projects
My research focuses on non-classical levers to induce cooperation in hierarchies and teams. I have studied both contracts and implicit mechanisms to tackle the operational challenge of inducing people to do things they might otherwise not have incentives to do - such as reducing food waste, volunteering, healthcare screening, and pursuing risky projects. In tackling this problem, my work is methodologically diverse, applying empirical methods to understand cooperation in practice and mechanism design to draw normative conclusions. This page describes my recent and ongoing research projects in this domain, with links to published or working papers as appropriate.
Citations: 98
H-Index: 4
Hold Me Accountable: Anonymity and Prosocial Behavior
Published at M&SOM (May 2025)
With Claire Senot (Tulane University). This paper focuses on the lever of accountability and how it can used to motivate prosocial behavior in a hierarchical setting. This paper uses a quasi-experimental method to investigate how service providers can use the names of their consumers to create an implicit incentive to engage in prosocial behavior by relying on social context. We study the case where a service provider removed the names of participants from test kits in a viral testing program. The effect was a surprising 21% reduction in participation, negative moderated by the size of the groups participants were randomly assigned to. We confirm the robustness of this result using difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, and augmented local linear models. We examine further moderating effects and offer guidance to service providers can use accountability as an implicit lever to encourage prosocial behavior, both in volunteering settings and businesses. View this paper on SSRN.
Presented at: POMS 2023, INFORMS 2023, University of Toronto, Wharton Empirical Workshop 2024, POMS 2024.
Media Attention:
Minority Figures: Gender Tokenism and Prosocial Behavior
Under review at Organization Science (August 2025)
With Claire Senot (Tulane University). This paper focuses on how to induce cooperation within teams, as opposed to my other work that has studied hierarchies. Specifically, we examine how the social status created by gender diversity in a team can affect the members’ decisions to participate in a voluntary initiative. We take advantage of a unique setting to study the effect of including variations in social status induced by gender composition to study status-seeking behaviors can act as an implicit means to induce inter-team cooperation on a shared task. We find that compensatory behavior leads individuals in the significant gender minority to exert more effort, but that the gender majority does not respond to this. Moreover, when we study the effect of increased diversity on implicit incentives, we find that a gender balance of 60/40 or greater is needed for an increase in overall cooperation across the group. As well as providing insights on new social mechanisms for aligning incentives, we also provide insights for the design of diversity schemes and affirmative action programs that encourage the positive benefits of gender diversity. View this paper in SSRN.
Presented at: POMS 2025
Cultures for Innovation
Under review at Management Science (August 2025)
With Jeremy Hutchison-Krupat (University of Cambridge). All successful organizations chase paradigm shifting innovations, but how can they create an environment that maximizes their chances of uncovering these innovations when it is impossible to articulate the path to success specifically? This requires a non-traditional mechanism, as contracts cannot be written when the actions are unknown and monitoring is ineffective. To puruse these so-called ‘unknown-unknown’ innovations requires a culture that can tolerate failure, but as we show in this paper, determining the optimal innovation culture is a subtle and complex decisions. We model the relationship as a principal-agent model of a relational contract, where both parties continue to cooperate only because it is in the best long-term interests to sustain the relationship, rather than defect from it. Our ground-breaking modelling identifies the importance, but also the limitations, of tolerating failure and reveals how their exists an optimal portfolio of innovations, given an organization’s culture. We also shed light on how management may try to adjust their culture to expand this portfolio. We provide managers with important quantitative insights on the cultural aspects of innovation, a topic that can often seem mysterious. View this paper on SSRN.
Presented at: INFORMS 2024, POMS 2025, INFORMS 2025 (Forthcoming)
No Spoilers: Grocery supply chain traceability and food waste
Under Revision (May 2025), target Management Science
With Javad Nasiry (McGill University). This paper examines the challenges posed to equity by food waste, where millions of tonnes of potential edible food is wasted while people go hungry. Reducing food waste is not typically in the best interests of retail businesses, who benefit from maximizing their coverage of demand and reducing sourcing costs, which can lead to unnecessary waste. In this paper, we examine how contracts can be written based on technology investments and the quality information sharing, rather than simply wholesale prices and order quantities. We should that an optimal combination of technology investment and information transparency exists, that is both profit maximizing and waste minimizing, but that this depends on the policy environment. View this paper on SSRN.
Presented at: INFORMS 2024, POMS 2025, McGill University.
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An Invisible Workforce: Coordinating Voluntary Effort in the AI Supply Chain
Working paper, under preparation for submission to Management Science Q4 2025
With Setareh Farahjollahzadeh (McGill University, Desautels Faculty of Management). The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) has created enormous demand for high-quality labeled data, making human annotation a critical bottleneck in the AI supply chain. As a result, many organizations have turned to crowdsourcing to label data, yet sustaining these contributions, which are often voluntary, remains a major coordination challenge, especially when financial incentives are limited or infeasible. Drawing on psychological theories of intrinsic motivation, we investigate whether ``effort conditioning'' -- associating effort itself with intrinsic reward -- can serve as a non-monetary lever for motivating sustained discretionary effort in crowdsourced data labeling. We conduct one of the largest known field experiments in operations management, leveraging a crowdsourcing initiative embedded in a popular video game. Over 400,000 participants completed nearly 57 million annotation tasks between 2021 and 2024, with puzzles and their target quality thresholds randomly varied to manipulate the effort–reward relationship. We find that higher minimum targets in their recent experience condition participants to exert more discretionary effort beyond the required threshold, persist longer after extrinsic rewards are removed, and explore more candidate solutions within tasks. We further document `de-conditioning' effects when participants face lower subsequent targets or take extended breaks. However, this conditioning comes at the cost of slower efficiency learning, revealing a trade-off between exploration and productivity. Our findings extend behavioral theories of effort into crowdsourcing operations and identify performance targets as a double-edged coordination mechanism: while they can increase discretionary effort and solution quality, they may reduce throughput learning. We discuss implications for managers of crowdsourcing, data annotation, and prosocial operations, where motivating voluntary effort is essential, but the ability to rely on extrinsic incentives are limited.
Presented at: forthcoming