Research into optimizing blood bank donations has garnered PhD student Tianshu Sun a finalist position in a math competition organized by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
Sun, who’s studying in the Decisions Operations and Information Technologies department at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, is competing against peers from MIT, Georgia Tech and North Carolina State University. The competition is dubbed “Doing Good with Good OR.” INFORMS will announce the winner in early November.
Sun’s INFORMS-selected entry, Motivating Blood Donation,” is based on his paper “The Optimal Policy Design to Motivate Blood Donation: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment and a Structural Model.” Based on a randomized field of 80,000 participants, Sun tested the effect of different policies in driving donations and found that blood banks can use rewards to motivate group formations that increase donation. Group rewards are four times more cost effective than individual rewards.
In 2014, Sun placed third in INFORMS’ Service Science Best Paper Award Competition for “Understanding the Effects of Message Design on Firm-Mediated Online Social Interactions.”
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