OPERATIONS

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..