In Spring 2018, Riipen launched a two-sided marketplace feature on our platform. This marketplace feature allows employers to apply to work with professors (as they could before), and also allows professors to apply to work with companies (a new feature as of April 2018). Internally, these applications are called "requests" as the other party must approve or decline the request to collaborate.

Since launch, we've seen significant growth in the number of professors requesting companies. A challenge that was encountered early on was that some users were not responding to requests, or were responding very slowly, causing frustration for the other party. On November 21, 2018, we launched a "request expiry" feature which requires users to respond to requests with 14 days, or they will expire.

We would be interested in having students look into how requests have evolved over time.

• Number of requests per user, by user type
• Volume of requests (of both types) over time
• Request response time
• Request acceptance rate
• Request expiry rate

With respect to the metrics above, it would be interesting to look at how (or whether) the Nov 21 launch of request expiry has changed user behaviour.

Do users now respond to requests more quickly? Send more requests? Less? Our hypothesis was that they would respond more quickly, and send more requests due to the improved response rate.

We can provide anonymized data up to the launch of the project, from April 2018 forward (approximately 2400 requests to date). We can also provide complementary data sets if needed, such as new user accounts created over time.