Evgeny Kagan

Evgeny Kagan

Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Carey Business School

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A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there is an XML version available for digesting as well.

Pages

Splash Page

Published:

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Posts

Future Blog Post

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This post will show up by default. To disable scheduling of future posts, edit config.yml and set future: false. Read more

Blog Post number 4

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool. Read more

Blog Post number 3

less than 1 minute read

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This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool. Read more

Blog Post number 2

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool. Read more

Blog Post number 1

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool. Read more

portfolio

Mentoring in Startup Ecosystems

Co-authored with Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, David Brophy, Thomas Jensen and Melanie Milovac.
In this report (commissioned by the Kauffman foundation) we look at how entrepreneurial accelerators and incubators organize their mentoring initiatives. We distill some of the best practices and discuss the differences between university and non-university accelerators, and the lessons learned for setting up such programs. Read more

One at a Time? The Personal Productivity Bias in Emergency Department Patient Assignment

Co-authored with Brett Hathaway and John Jones.
Emergency departments often use a shared-queue setup in which physicians self-assign cases from a pool of triaged patients. Using data from five emergency departments and experiments with healthcare workers and ED physicians, we show that batching, i.e., self-assigning multiple patients at once, is common, is associated with longer stays for batched patients, and persists even when it reduces physicians’ own payoffs, a behavior we term the personal productivity bias. Read more

What’s in a Queue? An Experimental Study of Job Ordering, Autonomy and Queue Visibility

How a queue of jobs is arranged and presented to workers is an important design problem in service operations. In this paper we use online experiments to examine how job ordering, worker autonomy and queue visibility affect the speed and quality of work. We find that workers who choose their own job order perform worse than workers with an imposed order, and that seeing new jobs arrive produces a short-term productivity burst. Read more

publications

Ideation-Execution in Product Development: An Experimental Analysis (with Stephen Leider and William Lovejoy)

Published in Management Science, 2018

This paper is about allocating development time between (creative) idea generation activities, and more production related execution activities. We find that developers benefit from firm deadlines early on in the creative process. Granting developers more autonomy leads to delays in idea inception and development.

Link to publication  |  Pre-print

Equity Contracts and Incentive Design in Start-Up Teams (with Stephen Leider and William Lovejoy)

Published in Management Science, 2020

This paper studies incentive design in startups, specifically how to split equity in a startup. We find that founders who choose to split equally invest little effort into the venture after the split. Thus, a preference for a contract type can be seen as a signal of being a good (or bad) collaborator. Delaying the equity split until some work is done helps remove some of the collaboration difficulties.

Link to publication  |  Pre-print

The Gatekeeper’s Dilemma: When Should I Transfer This Customer? (with Brett Hathaway and Maqbool Dada)

Published in Operations Research, 2023

This paper studies incentives for service workers handling customer service requests. We find that workers are able to incorporate congestion into their decisions - that is, they spend more time with customers when congestion is low, and less time when congestion is high. However, workers struggle to incorporate different components of compensation scheme, such as rewards for successful resolution, and costs for transfers.

Link to publication  |  Pre-print

Operational Strategies for Customer Service: A Gatekeeper Framework (with Maqbool Dada and Brett Hathaway)

Published in Production and Operations Management, 2025

This paper develops a model of customer service request resolution in contact centers. This allows us to examine the broader question of strategic selection of an appropriate mix of service channels: live-agent-only, chatbot-only, or both. We show that the availability of chatbot technology may change request resolution policies with important implications for service quality and cost

Link to publication  |  Pre-print

Sequential Decision Making: From Decision Elicitation to Strategy Identification (with Stephen Leider and Ozge Sahin)

Published in Management Science, 2025

In this paper we look at how people make dynamic (sequential) decisions. We examine decision-making in a range of dynamic problems and find, unsurprisingly, that most people are not ‘forward-looking optimizers’. Rather, decision rules depend on the type of environment: decision rules are static in stopping problems (Stop in round X), but are quite sophisticated in other dynamic problems.

Link to publication  |  Pre-print

On Repeat: Does Iteration Drive Innovation? (with Christian Jost, Sebastian Schiffels and Tobias Lieberum)

Forthcoming in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM), 2025

In this paper we examine how agile development principles (iterative sprints, autonomy) affect innovation performance. We find that frequent iterations help improve performance in complex tasks by increasing exploration behaviors. The main mechanism is slower learning under sequential (non-iterative) workflow.

Link to publication  |  Pre-print

Startup Contracting and Entrepreneur-Investor Bargaining (with Kyle Hyndman and Anyan Qi)

Forthcoming in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM), 2026

In this research we study how entrepreneurs and investors divide equity. We use the Nash bargaining framework and test several predictions in the lab. We find that the number of investors can have either a positive or a negative effect on the ability of the entrepreneur to retain equity in their venture. Preferred Stock contracts, which are popular in practice, lead to more aggressive investor bargaining tactics.

Link to publication  |  Pre-print

Why Are Customers Averse to Service Chatbots? (with Brett Hathaway and Maqbool Dada)

Forthcoming in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM), 2026

Chatbot technology can help service firms reduce staffing needs and achieve cost savings. In this paper we use online experiments to examine how people respond to chatbots. We examine when and why chatbots are underutilized and propose a simple nudge to increase chatbot adoption.

Link to publication  |  Pre-print

Chasing Tails: How Do People Respond to Wait Time Distributions? (with Kyle Hyndman and Andrew Davis)

Accepted at Management Science, 2026

Waiting is something we encounter daily, whether standing in line at a coffee shop, awaiting a ride-share pickup at the airport, or sitting in a doctor’s office. In this study, we examine how different aspects of waiting affect our preferences among service providers. Our findings reveal that people respond negatively to waits that have a spike in long waiting times, and that standard models of risk aversion do not capture preferences well.

Pre-print

teaching

Operations Management

Undergraduate Course, University of Michigan, Ross School of Business, 2015

Operations Management studies the processes by which inputs of materials, labor, capital, and information are transformed into products and services which customers want and are willing to pay for. This course will provide students with the managerial tools needed to understand and articulate the impact of an organization’s business processes, and the ability to analyze and continuously improve these business processes to make things work better, faster and cheaper. Read more

Foundations of Business Analytics (JHU Carey, MBA, 2020-current)

Graduate Course, Johns Hopkins University, Carey Business School, 2020

Being a business leader in a data driven world requires the knowledge of both data-related (statistical) methods and of appropriate models to use that data. The Foundations of Business Analytics course focuses on the latter: it introduces students to quantitative (“analytical”) frameworks and techniques for decision making. At a high level, these techniques include optimization, risk modeling, and Monte Carlo simulation. For each methodology students are first exposed to the basic mechanics, and then apply the methodology to real world business problems using software. Read more