Maria Ibanez

Maria Ibanez is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She received her doctorate in Technology and Operations Management from Harvard Business School.

She specializes in worker discretion—freedom to decide which tasks to work on, when, and how. Her research investigates how to create the conditions that promote desirable exercise of discretion. From a practical perspective, her research focuses on improving performance by designing data-driven systems that lead individuals to exercise discretion in ways that increase their productivity and work quality. Her work spans archival big data and field experiments in contexts ranging from radiology to restaurant inspections and emergency departments. With a primary focus on healthcare, she collaborates with organizations to understand their work and develop implementable solutions for relevant challenges. Combining operations management with economic theory and the psychology of decision-making, she analyzes large-scale field data to identify causal relationships that generate new insights regarding the connections between operational factors, decision-making, and performance.

Professor Ibanez's research has been published in leading journals such as Management Science and has also been featured in popular press outlets, including The Economist, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review.

See Research and Publications