World Class Faculty & Research / July 23, 2015

Smith PhD’s ‘Motivating Blood Donation’ Study Draws INFORMS Honor

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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About the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business

The Robert H. Smith School of Business is an internationally recognized leader in management education and research. One of 12 colleges and schools at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Smith School offers undergraduate, full-time and flex MBA, executive MBA, online MBA, business master’s, PhD and executive education programs, as well as outreach services to the corporate community. The school offers its degree, custom and certification programs in learning locations in North America and Asia.

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