2021 INFORMS Information Systems Society Design Science Research Award winners

Two Carlson School Projects Share National Research Award

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Two research initiatives from Carlson School faculty were recognized on December 18 with the 2021 INFORMS Information Systems Society Design Science Research Award.

The COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project and Professor Alok Gupta’s research on flower market auctions shared the award, which is one of the top in the field of information systems.

The hospitalization tracking project collects, tracks, and publicly reports daily COVID-19 hospitalizations from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The award recognizes the design of the dashboard.

The hospitalization tracking project’s data has uncovered important insights that have helped states and hospitals better manage infection rates and patient caseloads. These results were published in several high-impact research articles in the Journal of American Medical Association and its network journals. Led by Professor Pinar Karaca-Mandic; Associate Professor Soumya Sen; Dr. Archelle Georgiou, an executive-in-residence; and PhD student Yi Zhu, the project is a collaborative effort between the two Carlson School centers: the Medical Industry Leadership Institute (MILI) and the Management Information Systems Research Center (MISRC). 

This award is the latest honor for the project, which also received a 2021 Innovations that Inspire award from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), and has been cited by hundreds of media outlets across the United States. The team also consisted of PhD students Khoa Vu and Zachary Levin, MILI Program Administrator Kimberly Choyke, and a team of undergraduate student research assistants.

Gupta, the senior associate dean of faculty, research, and administration and the Curtis L. Carlson Schoolwide Chair in Information Management, and his coauthors were honored for their work, titled “Designing Next Generation High-Speed Auction Markets.” The research was conducted with colleagues in Europe — Wolfgang Ketter, Yixin Lu, and Eric Van Heck — and draws upon economic theory, decision theory, cognitive and computational learning theory, and Information Systems (IS) design science principles to develop novel IT/IS artifacts that greatly improve the performance of complex business-to-business auction markets. 

The results and findings generated from this project pushed the frontiers of the understanding of how to leverage IT and IT-enabled applications to guide the design and operation of complex markets in the digital age. Besides making an impact worth more than $200 million per year on the business of one of the largest auction companies in the world (Royal FloraHolland), the research has been published four times in two of the top-tier, peer-reviewed journals: Management Science and MIS Quarterly.

The INFORMS ISS Design Science Award recognizes research efforts that use an experimental research approach, such as building and evaluating working IT systems or creating IT artifacts. The award “is principally focused on the quality, novelty, and significance of the IT artifact created and validated.”