Authors: Shikha Safaya, Basak Kalkanci, Ravi Subramanian. In preparation for submission to Management Science (Job Market Paper). 

Leveraging the insight of heterogeneity in volunteer and beneficiary preferences from surveys we conducted, we develop a game-theoretic model whereby we explore the tradeoff between incorporating volunteer preferences in task assignments versus pooling volunteers to alleviate mismatch between supply and demand. In doing so, we endogenize volunteers’ decisions to participate based on their expected utilities from serving beneficiaries and from their outside options. We analytically derive the conditions under which a particular policy may be preferred by the NPO, the volunteers and the beneficiaries. Consequently, we suggest levers that can be utilized by NPOs to better align the incentives of the stakeholders. Our findings offer prescriptive insights for NPOs to improve beneficiary service and volunteer engagement.

After we collected and analyzed the data, one of the key insights that emerged from the data was the existence of heterogeneity in service preferences – some volunteers and seniors primarily emphasize timely meal delivery, while others also value interpersonal interaction. 

We leverage this insight for building an analytical model with volunteer and beneficiary preferences, which is also my job market paper.