Gad Allon

About

Gad Allon is the Jeffrey A. Keswin Professor and Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the director of the Management and Technology Program at Wharton. His academic background includes a PhD in Management Science from Columbia Business School and Bachelor and Master degrees from the Israeli Institute of Technology. His research interests encompass operations management, service operations, and operations strategy, with a focus on models of information sharing among firms and customers in service and retail settings, as well as competition models in the service industry. Professor Allon has published in leading journals such as Management Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Operations Research. He has received recognition for his research, including the 2011 Wickham Skinner Early-Career Research Award from the Production and Operations Management Society. In addition to his research, he is an award-winning educator, teaching courses on scaling operations and operations strategy, and has been an innovative leader in educational technology initiatives, including co-founding ForClass, a platform aimed at increasing student engagement and accountability. He regularly consults firms on service and operations strategy and writes a weekly newsletter on related topics.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Business
• Marketing
• Economics
• Operations research
• World Wide Web
• Microeconomics
• Econometrics
• Computer Security
• Telecommunications

Selected publications

• The Impact of Behavioral and Economic Drivers on Gig Economy Workers

  Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2023 · 98 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Problem definition: Gig economy companies benefit from labor flexibility by hiring independent workers in response to real-time demand. However, workers’ flexibility in their work schedule poses a great challenge in terms of planning and committing to a service capacity. Understanding what motivates gig economy workers is thus of great importance. In collaboration with a ride-hailing platform, we study how on-demand workers make labor decisions; specifically, whether to work and work duration. O…

  PublisherDOI

• Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding in the Manufacturing and Services Sectors

  Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2020 · 96 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  In the last few years, we have seen the emergence of two new ways in which firms interact with outside stakeholders, namely crowdsourcing and crowdfunding service providers. In this article, we define crowdsourcing and crowdfunding terms, compare new business models with traditional ones, review the operations management research community’s contribution so far, point out useful frameworks for understanding the phenomena, illuminate promising research paths, and highlight open research questions…

  PublisherDOI

• The Reference Effect of Delay Announcements: A Field Experiment

  Management Science · 2021 · 35 citations

  We explore whether customers are loss averse in time and how delay information may impact such reference-dependent behavior using observational and field experiment data from two call centers of an Israeli bank. We consider settings with no announcements and announcements of different accuracy levels. We face two key challenges: (1) we do not observe the reference points customers use in our data, as any other field studies, and (2) it is difficult to separate the reference-dependent behavior fr…

  PublisherDOI

• When to Be Agile: Ratings and Version Updates in Mobile Apps

  Management Science · 2021 · 32 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Lean and agile models of product development organize the flexible capacity to rapidly update individual products in response to customer feedback. Although agile operations have been adopted across numerous industries, neither the benefits nor the factors explaining when firms choose to become agile are validated and understood. We study these questions using data on the development of mobile apps, which occurs through the dynamic release of new versions into the mobile app marketplace, and the…

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding Customer Retrials in Call Centers: Preferences for Service Quality and Service Speed

  Manufacturing & Service Operations Management · 2021 · 28 citations

  Problem definition: Customers are likely to initiate retrial calls when their previous contact with a call center fails to deliver a satisfactory resolution. According to industry reports, retrials are listed as a top annoying issue for customers and hurt call centers’ profits. Though recognizing this problem, call centers find it challenging to reduce retrials without overshooting their operating expenses. Our research aims to empirically understand the mechanism of customer retrials and then p…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Achal Bassamboo

  30 shared

• Awi Federgruen

  12 shared

• Jan A. Van Mieghem

  9 shared

• Wichinpong Park Sinchaisri

  7 shared

• Dennis Zhang

  Washington University in St. Louis

  6 shared

• Qiuping Yu

  Georgetown University

  6 shared

• Eren B. Çil

  University of Oregon

  5 shared

• Kimon Drakopoulos

  University of Southern California

  4 shared

Labs

• Operations, Information and Decisions DepartmentPI

Awards & honors

• Wickham Skinner Early-Career Research Award (2011)
• Media coverage - Kellogg Insights
• Ideas for Leaders Finalist, Service Science Student Paper Co…
• Second Prize, CMU YinZOR Best Student Poster (2022)

Similar researchers at University of Pennsylvania

• Andrew B. Abelh-60
• Raffi Amith-58
• Eric T Bradlowh-53