Call for Papers
Operations has traditionally considered decision-making (including queuing, scheduling, pricing, routing) from the perspective of a single firm. However, in several recent socio-economic developments—for example, modern online platforms, decentralized energy generation, and decentralized ledgers—the requisite decisions are instead distributed among many independent people. While these crowd-based operations disrupt centrally controlled practices, they empower individuals and enable new applications. Whether intermediated by a centralized platform or wholly decentralized, the operations of these systems are complicated by the underlying complex network structures, the challenges of large-scale alignment of incentives, and of learning from data. Moreover, the decentralized and people-centric nature of processes on these platforms entails working with “indirect” operational levers such as recommendations, signaling, information design, and user interface design. They further pose additional constraints pertaining to fairness and ethics. We aim to bring together researchers from across operations management, computer science, and economics to explore new challenges and research directions of such crowd-based systems.
Potential areas include:
- Operations with crowds and volunteers
- Distributed ledgers and payment systems
- Decentralized energy markets and cloud energy storage
- Crowdfunding and micro-investing
- Decentralized decision-making and crowdsourced democracy
- Operational challenges in sharing economy and online labor platforms
- Achieving operational goals through information design, recommendations, and other new levers
Papers will be judged on relevance to the workshop theme, scientific merit, and potential for impact. We especially encourage: applied papers describing deployed systems, works in progress, papers about new application domains, and student-led papers. We also welcome position papers proposing new perspectives or questions related to the workshop themes. We will accept papers that have already appeared in other venues, though may hold such works to a higher bar for relevance.
Submissions will be either accepted as an oral presentation, or invited to present at our poster session.
Whether or not EC has an in-person component, this workshop will be completely virtual.
Important Dates
| Submission | May 21, 2021, Anywhere on Earth |
| Notification | June 28, 2021 |
| Workshop | July 23, 2021 |
Submission Requirements
Papers should be submitted on easychair. There are no formatting requirements or page limits, except that papers be in single column format. However, we will instruct reviewers that they do not have to read past the first 8 pages. Please ensure that relevance to the workshop theme, scientific merit, and any potential for impact are evident in the first 8 pages. Submitted pdfs should be fully anonymized.