Recent, Ongoing, and Future Research Projects

My research examines three areas, linked by their close association to behavioral operations management and motivation. This page provides a brief overview of these recent and active research projects.

Citations: 92

H-Index: 4

Prosocial Behavior

My research interest in prosocial behavior is in the link with visibility. Two of my research projects have contributed to active stream of research that shows changes in the design of process that make individuals actions more visible, such as removing their anonymity, can motivate them to behave more prosocially:

Hold Me Accountable: Anonymity and Prosocial Behavior

Published at M&SOM (May 2025)

With Claire Senot (Tulane University). When we design operational processes and information systems, small changes in how consumers interact with the service provider are often overlooked. This paper uses a quasi-experiment method to investigate such an event — when 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 on how to use identity priming to enhance the prosocial behavior of consumer interactions. 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 Management Science (May 2025)

With Claire Senot (Tulane University). The conventional wisdom argues that gender diversity is a good thing — going from a single gender team to a mixed gender team has been shown to increase sales performance, reduce risk, and enhance creativity - but what about prosocial behavior? In this paper, we take advantage of a unique setting to study the effect of including gender tokens compared to single gender teams. We find that the prosocial behavior of tokens is higher than peers, but there is not spillover to the rest of the team. To identify whether gender diversity can ever lead to a positive spillover on prosocial behavior, we develop an advanced identification strategy and find that a gender balance of 60/40 or greater is needed to induce an increase in the prosocial behavior of the gender majority. We offer critical insights for the design of diversity schemes and affirmative action programs. Contact me for a pre-print.

Presented at: POMS 2025

Innovation Behavior

Pursuing novel innovation projects involves an important, and understudied, behavioral issue: the R&D managers or employees of a business have a large amount of discretion in how they pursue tasks and what they invest effort it. My research in innovation management address the issue of how to encourage autonomous individuals, tasked with ambiguous tasks, to invest maximum effort towards novel innovation. Of my two active studies here, one is purely theoretical, while the other conducts one of the largest known behavioral experiments in our field.

Cultures for Innovation

Working paper, under preparation for submission for Management Science Q2 2025

With Jeremy Hutchison-Krupat (University of Cambridge). All successful organizations chase paradigm shifting innovations, but how can they create a culture that maximizes their chances of uncovering these innovations when it is impossible to articulate the path to success specifically? These so-called unknown-unknown innovations require a culture that can tolerate failure, but as we show in this paper, determining the optimal innovation culture is a subtle and complex decisions. What extent should R&D activities be monitored? How can we ensure that we tolerate failure but not incompetence? Can monitoring something you don’t want actually help you get something you do want? Our ground-breaking modelling address all of these questions and more. We provide managers with important quantitative insights on the cultural aspects of innovation, a topic that can often seem mysterious. Contact me for a pre-print.

Presented at: INFORMS 2024, POMS 2025, INFORMS 2025 (Forthcoming)

Free Will: The Consequences of the Speed-Quality Trade-Off

Working paper, under preparation for submission to Management Science Q4 2025

Solo Project (for now…). In many contexts, workers have a high degree of freedom to chooses their tasks, from ER physicians, to professors, to consulting managers. Prior worker, while observation in nature, has shown that task discretion may affect throughput and learning. In this study, we partner with (redacted) organizations in a unique online setting to conduct an experiment that generated over 100,000,000 participant-task interactions. We observe participants completing tasks of varying complexities over 4 years. Participants have discretion to exceed minimum quality standard and to choose whether they ‘exploit’ simpler tasks for a quick reward, or ‘explore’ over harder tasks and forego this reward. Through numerous OLS and IV models, we examine performance, learning, motivation, and retention as affected by task discretion. Our results reveal both the benefits and pitfalls of task discretion from a carefully designed, generalisable, controlled experiment. Contact me for a pre-print.

Presented at: INFORMS 2025 (forthcoming)

Food Waste

McGill’s operations management group specializes in retail. As part of my collaboration with this group, my colleague Javad Nasiry and I have secured $86,000 of funding to support our research into the link between technology innovations and food waste. Our paper on this topic examines how contractual mechanisms may be used to motivate the adoption of waste reducing traceability systems.

No Spoilers: Grocery supply chain traceability and food waste

Under Revision (May 2025)

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. Specifically, we investigate the role of supply chain traceability systems (such as those with Blockchain as an underlying technology) in reducing perishable food waste from over-ordering and processing errors. We determine the conditions under which economic and social incentives align to maximize the value of traceability and propose policy changes to encourage this behavior. View this paper on SSRN.

Presented at: INFORMS 2024, POMS 2025, McGill University.