URI_Research _Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2020_Melissa-McCarthy

Özpolat calls cash donations “smart compassion” because it allows humanitarian agencies to buy what is needed, when it is needed, and in the quantities that are needed.

Koray Özpolat Associate Professor Supply Chain Management

are made instead. Özpolat calls cash donations “smart compassion” because it allows humanitarian agencies to buy what is needed, when it is needed, and in the quantities that are needed. “Many Americans will take their teddy bear or a pair of jeans and pack it up and go to FedEx and send it to the people of Haiti or the Philippines after a disaster in those countries, or somewhere else,” he says. “But our calculator shows that buying a pair of jeans and shipping it to the Philippines will cost about $153. That money could be better spent buying 27,000 liters of clean drinking water or 20 blankets locally, which would be much more useful than a pair of jeans.” Özpolat and doctoral student Hee Yoon Kwon are working to upgrade the donation calculator this year by using virtual reality technologies and gaming

principles to better engage potential donors in making the right donation decisions. In collaboration with doctoral student Lee Hong, he is also examining the cultural differences among humanitarian agencies and the beneficiaries they serve across the globe to learn whether these differences affect humanitarian operations. A third research project involves a behavior called blatant benevolence online, or the sharing on social media about donations made or good deeds done. Doctoral student Jay Zhang conducted interviews with 120 people to better understand the motivation behind posting prosocial behavior online. How do others react? Does it create social capital by making more friends or deepening engagement with current friends? Özpolat and Zhang will conduct a laboratory experiment this year to search for a link between

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