James R. Scott

Welcome to my website!

I'm a PhD student in Operations Management at Duke University. I study the operational decisions made by online platforms—most recently Food Delivery Platforms like DoorDash—using game theory, optimization, and decision-aware Machine Learning methods. Bora Keskin is my doctoral advisor. 

Platforms face the difficult challenge of balancing their own interests with those of multiple groups of users (for example, customers, delivery drivers, and restaurants in the case of a food delivery platform). Get the balance right, and the platform explodes in popularity and profitability. Get the balance wrong, and the platform fades into obscurity and/or bankruptcy. The difficulty of striking a good balance makes this an exciting area of study for me.

Before coming to Duke, I received a BS in Mathematics from Brigham Young University and an MS in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University. While at A&M, I spent a summer interning with BNSF Railway's Operations Research & Advanced Analytics team.