BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Two emerging scholars in decision sciences and business analytics at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business have been honored for early research that is expected to make important contributions to the field.
Asa Palley, an assistant professor of operations and decision sciences (pictured left), received the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award at the Society for Judgment and Decision Making conference in New Orleans.
The purpose of this award is to encourage outstanding work by new researchers who have completed their Ph.D. within the last five years.
Palley won for his paper, “Extracting the Wisdom of Crowds When Information is Shared,” which is forthcoming in the journal Management Science.
“Much has been written about the wisdom of crowds – averaging the opinions of many people can perform as well or better than individual experts,” he said. “However, the wisdom of crowds is hampered when each crowd member taps into shared information in addition to their own personal reservoir of knowledge.
“We develop a new method – pivoting – that can overcome the shared information problem and thereby harness the complete wisdom of the crowd,” Palley added.
An earlier version of the paper received the 2015 Decision Analysis Society Student Paper Award when Palley was completing his doctorate at Duke University.
Lucy Yan, also an assistant professor of operations and decision technologies (pictured right), was a runner-up for the Young Researcher Best Paper Award at last month’s Conference on Health IT and Analytics in Washington, D.C. The conference is an annual research summit for health IT and analytics research. It includes a doctoral consortium for scholars from more than 40 research institutes, leading policymakers, and practitioners.
Her paper, “Modeling Users’ Continuous Participation: Evidence from Online Weight-Loss Communities,” also was a finalist for INFORMS’ eBusiness Best Paper Award this year.
“This paper follows and extends my earlier work that studies how online healthcare communities help individuals to improve their health knowledge and better engage in their own health management,” she said.
These honors follow other recent, similar recognition for faculty in the department. Vijay Khatri, professor and chairperson of the Department of Operations and Decision Technologies, the Arthur M. Weimer Faculty Fellow and co-director of the Kelley Institute for Business Analytics, said these honors demonstrate the school’s leadership role within a rapidly evolving field.
“Our faculty are conducting cutting-edge research that both makes strong conceptual contribution and influences practice,” Khatri said. “They are also bringing their innovative research back into our classrooms and developing outstanding learning opportunities for our students.”