Faculty

Jim Orlin has won the ACM SIGecom Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on E-commerce) Test of Time Award, which recognizes papers published between 10 and 25 years ago that have had “significant impact on research or applications that exemplify the interplay of economics and computation.” Orlin’s winning paper, (co-authored with John J. Bartholdi, III of Georgia Tech), is entitled “Single Transferable Vote Resists Strategic Voting.” The award committee characterized this paper as being one of two that in many ways catalyzed an entire field, noting its influence on the subfield of computational social choice.

Otto Scharmer has received the Leonardo Award 2016 in Thought Leadership, a Leonardo European Corporate Learning Award addressing the “future of learning.” The award recognizes the value and contribution of Scharmer’s management method “Theory U.”

Anna Stansbury, Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies, has won the 2021 Upjohn Institute Dissertation Award (First Prize). With this annual award, the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research recognizes the best PhD dissertations on employment-related policies and issues, from any academic discipline, but requiring a substantial policy thrust to inform better policymaking.

Stansbury’s winning dissertation is entitled “Essays on Power in Labor Markets.” For more detail beyond her dissertation summary, these full papers are very similar to the three essays in her dissertation:

1) “Employer Concentration and Outside Options”

2) “The Declining Worker Power Hypothesis”

3) “Do US Firms Have an Incentive to Comply with the FLSA and NLRA?”

and “Under the Wage Floor:  Exploring Firms’ Incentives to Comply with the Minimum Wage”

The recent award announcement regarding the winners notes the “path-breaking contributions to our understanding of some of the most salient employment issues of our time, including the bargaining power of workers…” that “…undoubtedly will influence not only future academic research but also our thinking about a range of state and federal social policies” (Susan N. Houseman, Vice President and Director of Research at the Upjohn Institute).

Eric von Hippel is the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This career-achievement award is granted "to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future." The award honors von Hippel’s groundbreaking research on user innovations and his work fostering international exchange and scientific discussions around user innovation and open source innovation, including initiating the Open and UserInnovation Conference, which is now an internationally acclaimed forum. 

Von Hippel was also awarded an honorary doctorate of economics and social science by the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, a major German technical university, "for his path-breaking contributions in the research area of user innovation and for his tireless efforts to support young researchers in their academic career paths." This is his third honorary doctorate.

Steve Eppinger was invited to deliver the autumn 2019 Technical University of Denmark Ørsted Lecture. The aim of the lecture series is “to stimulate new thoughts and new scientific approaches by presenting topics that will change our future,” with “the most advanced and frontier breaking research.” This biannual event commemorates the university’s founder, Hans Christian Ørsted, who discovered electromagnetism. Eppinger joins a distinguished list of invited lecturers who are leading scientists from the fields of science and engineering, including several Nobel laureates.  

Michelle Hanlon and Nemit Shroff have received the 2017 American Tax Association (ATA) Outstanding Manuscript Award. This annual award recognizes a significant contribution to the tax literature published during the three prior calendar years. The winning paper, co-authored with John R. Graham (Duke University Fuqua School of Business professor) and Terry Shevlin (University of California, Irvine Paul Merage School of Business professor), is entitled “Incentives for Tax Planning and Avoidance: Evidence from the Field.”

Sinan Aral’s paper “The Spread of True and False News Online” (co-authored with Deb Roy and Soroush Vosoughi, both at MIT Media Lab), which was published on the cover of Science in March, has not only made the Top 10 of the Altmetric Top 100 list; it has been ranked by Altmetric as the second-most-talked-about academic paper of 2018 in any scientific discipline.  In order to more fully capture the influence and reach of scholarly work and identify research generating significant international online attention and discussion, Altmetric tracks many distinct sources, including—in addition to a scholarly citation database—public-policy papers, news articles, blogs, syllabi, and social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. 

The ranking was announced  in “The most discussed and shared scientific research of 2018.” Aral’s paper was given an Altmetric Attention Score of 8646, with details here. 

Dimitris Bertsimas and Otto Scharmer were each awarded the 2015 Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching, established to honor educational innovation and excellence. The Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching Award is the most prestigious teaching prize offered by the School. The award was established in 2006 and is awarded each year to two MIT Sloan faculty members, as well as two electrical engineering and computer science faculty members, for their contributions to educational excellence at MIT.

Dimitris Bertsimas was awarded the 2008 Farkas Prize of the INFORMS Optimization Society, for his research work on robust optimization and its applications. The Farkas Prize is awarded bi-annually by INFORMS for the most significant contribution to the field of optimization by a researcher.

Nemit Shroff and Michelle Hanlon have received the 2017 American Tax Association (ATA) Outstanding Manuscript Award. This annual award recognizes a significant contribution to the tax literature published during the three prior calendar years. The winning paper, co-authored with John R. Graham (Duke University Fuqua School of Business professor) and Terry Shevlin (University of California, Irvine Paul Merage School of Business professor), is entitled “Incentives for Tax Planning and Avoidance: Evidence from the Field.”