Hang Ren, a PhD student at UCL School of Management, has been nominated for the INFORMS Service Science Section Best Student Paper Award.

The award, which was introduced in 2013, celebrates the best research published in the Section’s sponsored journal Service Science. 

Hang will present his paper, titled ‘Managing service systems with unknown quality and customer anecdotal reasoning’, at the annual meeting in Nashville, USA.

The paper studies a service system where customers estimate service quality from anecdotal evidence. Hang characterizes the service provider’s pricing, quality information disclosure, and quality control decisions, and he finds that the service provider adopts a pricing strategy very different from the fully rational benchmark. Moreover, he finds that she should reserve quality information when queueing is more costly, and she may disclose one type of service quality anecdote but not the other. Lastly, the service provider may reduce service quality when customers obtain more anecdotes.