Operations and Information Management Faculty Publications

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  • Publication
    Recognition in Personal Data: Data Warping, Recognition Concessions, and Social Justics
    (2024) Stelmaszak, Marta; Wagner, Erica; DuPont, Nicolle Nixon
    Data-related harm and injustice are commonly viewed through instrumental, procedural, distributional, or representational theories of social justice. These theories do not account for the social injustice that occurs through the lack of recognition of individuals when data are first conceptualized. We explore the recognition of individuals in data conceptualization by drawing from information systems (IS) literature on data artifacts that acknowledges the fact that data are comprised of semantics and formats. Guided by recognition theory, we studied a project to expand sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) data collection at a public, U.S.-based LGBTQ+ welcoming university. We found that while the actors involved worked towards recognizing in SOGI data the fact that identities are layered, non-binary, plural, and fluid, the data themselves still misrecognized individuals due to data warping. We argue that data warping occurs because of recognition concessions between social recognition through data semantics and systems recognition through data formats. Such concessions are both necessary for some recognition but accessory to misrecognition. Our findings have implications for recognition theory, data justice, and information systems research, as well as for personal data in practice.
  • Publication
    How to increase the impact of disaster relief: A study of transportation rates, framework agreements and product distribution
    (2019-01-01) Gossler, Timo; Wakolbinger, Tina; Nagurney, Anna; Daniele, Patrizia
    Due to restricted budgets of relief organizations, costs of hiring transportation service providers steer distribution decisions and limit the impact of disaster relief. To improve the success of future humanitarian operations, it is of paramount importance to understand this relationship in detail and to identify mitigation actions, always considering the interdependencies between multiple independent actors in humanitarian logistics. In this paper, we develop a game-theoretic model in order to investigate the influence of transportation costs on distribution decisions in long-term relief operations and to evaluate measures for improving the fulfillment of beneficiary needs. The equilibrium of the model is a Generalized Nash Equilibrium, which has had few applications in the supply chain context to date. We formulate it, utilizing the construct of a Variational Equilibrium, as a Variational Inequality and perform numerical simulations in order to study the effects of three interventions: an increase in carrier competition, a reduction of transportation costs and an extension of framework agreements. The results yield important implications for policy makers and humanitarian organizations (HOs). Increasing the number of preselected carriers strengthens the bargaining power of HOs and improves impact up to a certain limit. The limit is reached when carriers set framework rates equal to transportation unit costs. Reductions of transportation costs have a consistently positive, but decreasing marginal benefit without any upper bound. They provide the highest benefit when the bargaining power of HOs is weak. On the contrary, extending framework agreements enables most improvements when the bargaining power of HOs is strong.