About

Ken Moon is a Senior Fellow in the Operations, Information and Decisions Department at Wharton. His research focuses on data analytics for workforces and marketplaces, marketplace design, pricing, and matching, as well as structural estimation, machine learning, and econometrics. His work includes empirical measurement and structural modeling of strategic behavior in gig economy workers, analysis of quality improvement incentives in the U.S. hospital industry, and the impact of fake news on echo chambers and information consumption. Additionally, he investigates the effects of worker turnover on manufacturing productivity and product reliability, as well as the timing and benefits of agility in mobile app development. His research contributes to understanding how firms and policymakers can optimize operational efficiency, labor market policies, and digital marketplace design.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Business
• Computer Security
• Economics
• Industrial organization
• Operations management
• Microeconomics
• Management
• Marketing
• Finance
• Labour economics
• Mathematics
• Clinical psychology
• Medicine
• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Internet privacy
• Process management
• World Wide Web
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Algorithmic Screening and Access in the Gig Economy

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• First, Do No Harm: Do Staffing Shortages Drive Abuse and Malfeasance in U.S. Nursing Homes?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• When Workloads Are Emotional Labor: An Empirical Study of Livestreaming Productivity

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• First, Do No Harm: Do Staffing Shortages Drive Abuse and Malfeasance in U.S. Nursing Homes?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Toward a More Granular Understanding of Antecedents and Consequences of Employee Mobility

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  Employee mobility has garnered substantial attention across academics and practitioners for its increasing relevance in the modern workplace and its significant impacts on outcomes that drive firm competitive advantage. Despite rich literature on the organizational impacts of employee mobility within and across organizations, it remains unclear when and how organizations are able to reap benefits from employee mobility given that mobility also disrupts shared knowledge, coordination, and relational ties. The proposed symposium serves to develop a deeper understanding of the antecedents and consequences of employee mobility by testing important factors that have been overlooked such as cultural strength and training investments and by making use of granular, big data to identify pathways by which harmful effects of worker mobility are produced and alleviated.

  PublisherDOI

• Searching for the Best Yardstick: Cost of Quality Improvements in the U.S. Hospital Industry

  Management Science · 2023-07-27 · 4 citations

  article

  The Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program is Medicare’s implementation of yardstick incentives applied to hospitals in the United States. Under the VBP Program, 2% of all Medicare payments to hospitals, estimated to be U.S. $1.9 billion in fiscal year 2021, are withheld and redistributed based on their relative performance in the quality of delivered care. We develop a dynamic mean-field equilibrium model in which hospitals are engaged in repeated competition under yardstick incentives. Using structural estimation methods, we recover key parameters that govern hospitals’ decisions to invest in quality improvement, including the financial and nonfinancial costs and uncertain outcomes of investment. By dynamically solving for hospitals’ individually optimal investment policies, we estimate the trajectory of quality improvements for each hospital, including its investment decisions and quality levels throughout the implementation of the VBP Program. Our counterfactual analyses explore the benefits, on the one hand, of modifying the overall size of the yardstick incentives and on the other hand, of implementing a more focused program tailored to hospital type. We find that increasing the size of the incentives from 2% to 4% would have resulted in an additional quality investment of U.S. $1.2 billion from 2011 to 2018, leading to a 3.3% reduction in the average rate of central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs). Applying yardstick incentives to the tailored hospital peer groups, even without changing the size of the incentives, can lead to an average reduction of 1.4% in the rate of CLABSI among groups of hospitals associated with the highest costs of quality investment. This paper was accepted by Stefan Scholtes, healthcare management. Funding: K. Moon acknowledges support from the Wharton School [Claude Marion Endowed Faculty Scholar Award]. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4875 .

  PublisherDOI

• An Empirical Study of Blockchain-Driven Transparency in a Consumer Marketplace

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Managing Multihoming Workers in the Gig Economy

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Measuring Strategic Behavior by Gig Economy Workers: Multihoming and Repositioning

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 13 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Does Fake News Create Echo Chambers?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022 · 5 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Security
  • Business
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Haim Mendelson

  Stanford University

  5 shared

• Patrick Bergemann

  University of California System

  4 shared

• Gad Allon

  University of Pennsylvania

  4 shared

• Kostas Bimpikis

  Stanford University

  4 shared

• Prashant Loyalka

  4 shared

• Ying Chen

  Guangxi Center for Disease Prevention and Control

  4 shared

• Amandeep Singh

  Lovely Professional University

  4 shared

• Wedad Elmaghraby

  3 shared

Labs

• Operations, Information and Decisions DepartmentPI