Dr. Özalp Özer, Ashbel Smith Professor of Operations Management, recently received the Management Science Best Paper Award for his 2011 paper “Trust in Forecast Information Sharing.” Özer wrote the paper together with his former PhD student, Dr. Yanchong Zheng, now a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, and his then industry collaborator at Hewlett-Packard Dr. Kay-Yut Chen, who is now at UT Arlington. The paper was “deemed to be the best paper in the prior three years (36 issues) of the journal, for its contribution to the theory and practice of management.”
This research determines and quantifies the role of trust (what was previously thought to be intangible and hence unquantifiable) between suppliers and buyers, Özer says. The research shows when trust is important in information sharing, how trust is affected by changes in the business environment, and how trust affects related operational and strategic decisions. The paper also builds an analytical model of trust, and accurately predicts human behavior. The research has been cited almost 90 times since it was published.
Özer’s research on this topic was also supported by a National Science Foundation’s Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry — GOALI — grant. The GOALI program funds projects that are deemed “high risk-high gain transformative research,” and that develop collaborative industry-university programs and offer direct transfer of new knowledge between academia and industry.
