Our Spatial Price Network Equilibrium Paradox Paper is Published

It was thrilling to see our paper, "A Spatial Price Network Equilibrium Paradox," published this past week in the Springer journal Optimization Letters!

The paper I co-authored with Ladimer S. Nagurney and Ismael Pour, who is one of my PhD students at the Isenberg School of Management. The work builds on the famous Braess Paradox and reveals through numerous examples that: the addition of a new route from a supply market to a demand market may result in the supply price being lowered; the route costs being increased, and the demand price (the price that the consumers pay) also being increased relative to their values prior to the route addition. This result shows that there could be negative effects for both producers and for consumers and is especially relevant to the case of agricultural commodities. Hence, farmers may suffer in terms of lower prices for their products, and consumers in terms of higher prices that they pay! It is, hence, critical to investigate the impacts of the supply chain network topology, from a network design perspective, that includes the route topology.

This paper was first presented at the conference in Halkidiki in honor of Professor Panos M. Pardalos: 

https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-outstanding-pardalos-70-conference.html

Ismael also presented the paper at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle last Fall and the slide deck can be downloaded here: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/INFORMS2024-Presentation-NPS.pdf

The paper went through two revisions and can be accessed through the Springer journal website:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11590-025-02244-y

We have done a lot of research on the Braess Paradox and even hosted the visit of Professor Dietrich Braess when I was a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. More info on the paradox on the Supernetwork Center website: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/braess/braess-new.html

Outstanding Presentation by Dr. Oleh Nivievskyi on Rebuilding Crossroads of Ukraine

Yesterday we had the honor and great pleasure of hearing Dr. Oleh Nivievskyi present at the Isenberg School of Management in the UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series! Dr. Nivievskyi's seminar title was, "Rebuilding Crossroads of Ukraine: Bridging the Gap Between Damage, Recovery, and European Aspirations." Dr. Nivievskyi is a Full Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) and a Siemens Research Fellow at the Freie University of Berlin. He is  a co-founder of the KSE Agro-Food Center.

His presentation was based on a paper, now in production in the Ukrainian Analytics Digest, which is edited by Eduard Klein, and which is co-authored with Dmytro Goriunov of KSE and me. We expect the paper to be published in an issue later this month.

Professor Nivievskyi had a few travel kerfuffles but made it to Northampton on Thursday via Amtrak from DC after flying from Europe. We picked him up at the train station and then had a lovely dinner at the Whately Inn al fresco.

He overnighted at the UMass Amherst Hotel and had a quick tour and meetings with students in the morning, followed by his outstanding presentation, and then lunch at The Commonwealth Restaurant.

It was wonderful to have a fabulous audience that included several exchange students from KSE plus our OIM Department Chair Professor Solak. Thanks to everyone for the great questions and discussions! It was thrilling to have two faculty from Amherst College, who are Ukrainian, join us for lunch.

The UMass Meet and Greet service provided a comfortable ride to the Springfield Union Station for his journey to NYC for some KSE business.

Along with my Isenberg PhD student, Dana Hassani, we had published several papers with Nivievskyi in such journals as Transportation Science, the European Journal of Operational Research, and the Journal of Global Optimization,  and a paper in the recent Dynamics of Disasters edited volume; see my recent post: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2025/07/working-with-colleagues-in-ukraine-is.html. It was very special that Nivievskyi could meet my PhD students in person, including co-author Dana.

We organized this event on short notice but one has to take advantage of opportunities. Having face to face engagements between scholars and students is very enriching education-wise and also personally!

Many thanks to the UMass Amherst Office of Global Affairs for the support of the partnership with KSE!

Welcoming my New PhD Student to the Isenberg School of Management

It has been a dynamic first two weeks of the new academic year at UMass Amherst! I have been busy teaching my Transportation & Logistics class at the Isenberg School of Management and also with PhD comprehensive exams (3 for our Operations Management (OM) PhD students, 2 of whom are my students) plus many additional meetings.

A highlight of a new academic year is always meeting new students.  I was delighted to meet my new OM PhD student, Sarvagya Jha, who is from India. He joined me and my three other PhD students: Dana Hassani, Samira Samadi, and Ismael Pour, in my office. I then took the photo below next to my framed mathematics academic genealogy tree, which, through my PhD advisor at Brown University Stella Dafermos, goes back to James Maxwell, Isaac Newton, and Galileo Galilei, which is quite inspiring, I must say. The academic genealogy was presented to me by my former PhD student Dong "Michelle" Li, who is now a tenured Associate Professor at Babson College in Wellesley,  MA.

You can read more about my academic genealogy on my blog here: https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-academic-family-tree-going-back-to.html

Good luck to all students on the new academic year!

Kudos to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter!

It is hard to believe that the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter was founded in 2004! I have been lucky to have served as its Faculty Advisor from its very inception and have seen so many of our wonderful student members graduate and excel professionally, whether as academics or practitioners. We have built an extraordinary community of students (and also faculty) that are advocates for, users of, and appliers of Operations Research (OR) and the Management Sciences (MS) and Analytics, working on making the world a better place.

The members come from the Isenberg School of Management, the College of Engineering, and the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst but all students, who are interested in OR/MS and Analytics, are welcome. Typically, the student members are PhD students but we have also had undergraduate students as members. Our invited seminars are advertised at UMass Amherst and are also open to the public.

On August 15, 2025, even though it was the summer still, we celebrated outstanding 2024-2025 officers and members with a special event. I presented award certificates in the beautiful Business Innovation Hub at the Isenberg School of Management to Officers: Ismael M. Pour, Samira Samadi, Semih Boz, Josh Gladstone, G. Busra Karkili, Yukti Kathuria, Sindhoora Prakash, Parisa Lotfibagha, and Mohammad Derakhshi and to Members: Yongdong Chen and Dana Hassani and thanked them for their service! Thanks also to faculty: Professors Arzum Akkas and Chaitra Gopalappa, who were able to join us. The pizza and salads provided by University of Massachusetts Amherst Dining were delicious as was the chocolate cake from Whole Foods. PhD students are so important to the intellectual life of a university. 

It is an honor to serve as this INFORMS Chapter's Faculty Advisor. Looking forward to another exciting academic year with chapter activities. Many thanks to all who support us! Additional photos and information on the Chapter activities can be found on its website: https://websites.umass.edu/umassinf/

The 2nd Virtual Conference on Ukraine was OUTSTANDING!

I'd like to thank KTH The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, for hosting our 2nd Virtual Conference on Ukraine August 22 and 23, 2025. It was truly outstanding. It was an intellectual feast with 3 Nobel Laureates in Economic Sciences: Daron Acemoglu, Roger Myerson, and Paul Krugman delivering keynotes along with Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Subal Kumbhakar. 

I was honored to also give a keynote (the first one) and have posted my presentation as well as that of my Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst PhD student Ismael M. Pour on the Supernetwork Center website: https://lnkd.in/gncCNfTK.

I would like to thank the President of KTH Royal Institute of Technology Anders Söderholm for his warm welcoming remarks as well as fellow members of the Organizing Committee: Lars Harvigson, Almas Heshmati, Hans Lööf, Paul Nystedt, Roman Sheremeta and Hans Westlund. I am grateful to all the presenters of papers as well as to the panelists who joined me in discussing: Challenges of Ukraine's Post-War Reconstruction. Thanks also to those who joined us from many different countries and engaged with us. The networks that we are building in support of Ukraine in terms of research, higher education, and policy-making are inspiring.

So many fascinating research questions are  percolating from this conference. The full program can be downloaded here: https://www.kth.se/ukraine-conference.

Thanks to UMass Amherst for issuing this nice press release: https://www.umass.edu/news/article/anna-nagurney-co-organizes-virtual-conference-featuring-three-nobel-laureates-map

Tomorrow we mark Ukraine's Independence Day in commemoration of the Declaration of Independence of 1991. Slava Ukraini.

Supply Chain Vulnerabilities and the Need for Diversification - Thanks to The Democracy Forum for the Invitation to Serve as a Panelist!

The invitation arrived a few weeks ago from Lord Charles Bruce, the President of The Democracy Forum. The panel webinar on "Supply Chain Vulnerabilities and the Need for Diversification," was to take place on July 29, 2025. I had mentioned that I would be traveling then. In fact, I would be on a short vacation in Ogunquit, Maine, but I could take part and join from my hotel. 

I am pleased that, yesterday, the panel took place and the Internet held up. It was a fascinating event and I wish that we had had more time than the scheduled hour. Lord Bruce did an excellent introduction to some of the pressing issues facing supply chains in this era and Humphrey Hawksley was an outstanding moderator. The full video of our panel is now posted on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyqPiPTGqjg

Thanks also to the audience for the engagement and their questions! I have already received some direct feedback.

I have been working on supply chains for over 20 years and have published multiple books on the topic as well as journal articles, many of which, more recently, focus on tariffs and other policy interventions, as well as geopolitical issues, including wars and strife, and their impacts on supply chains.

In my panel presentation, I emphasized supply chains as "networks" of suppliers, manufacturers, freight service providers, warehouse operators and, of course, consumers interacting as the resources are transformed into finished products and flow from origin points to the destinations, with consumers responding to prices, quality, etc. Such networks can be local or global in nature and are underpinned by such physical networks as transportation networks (roads, rails, rivers, oceans, air, etc.) as well as telecommunication networks and, of course, energy networks that provide the power. Workers (labour) are essential to each link in a supply chain network,  as became vividly apparent at the height of the pandemic with labor availability as well as productivity suffering.  Products in all sectors, including such critical ones as: agriculture and food processing, high tech, healthcare, automobiles, and construction rely on supply chains.

Mapping out supply chains allows for the visualization of the different tiers, their structure and complexity, and redundancies (or absence thereof), and  enables the identification of possible vulnerabilities. Challenges facing the management of supply chain networks now are numerous and include the negative effects of climate change (fires, floods, droughts, landslides)  and geopolitical risk due to violence and strife and wars.  Further stressing  supply chains and their management are tariffs and on-going trade wars, pushing decision-makers to act under great uncertainty.

Diversification is common in finance as in portfolio optimization as a means of reducing risk. Diversification in terms of supply chains  can involve having multiple suppliers, multiple manufacturing plants in different regions, and even using different routes for the shipments of goods. Diversification can reduce risk, increase resilience, and enhance flexibility and agility so that customers' needs are satisfied, while other stakeholders in supply chains optimize as closely as possible their objectives, which can include profit-maximization, and even the reduction of environmental impacts. It is important to consider "just-in-case" scenarios and to plan and mitigate accordingly. Supply chains are essential to our societies and economies and ensuring that they continue to function efficiently and cost-effectively supports the well-being of our communities.

I wish that we had had more time because the presentations were very informative and, I believe, that they will actually germinate new research.  My fellow panelists were: Manmohan Sodhi of Bayes Business School; Ruth Dearnley OBE of STOP THE TRAFFIK, and Mark Goh of National University of Singapore.

Thanks, again, to Lord Bruce and to Humphrey Hawksley for organizing this very timely panel and for posting the video recording for others to learn from and to enjoy.

I am certain that supply chains will continue to generate much interest because of their importance to all of us!

Congratulations to the 2025 Shevchenko Emergency Fellows! Honored to Have Served on the Committee

Russia's war on Ukraine continues to rage and is now in its 4th year. Many Ukrainian scholars, writers, and artists have been deeply affected.

I'd like to thank the Shevchenko Scientific Society (abbreviated NTSh in Ukrainian) for funding its second cohort of  Shevchenko Emergency Fellows (SEF). The first cohort was announced in 2022 and the 2025 cohort of 50 Fellows has just been announced: https://shevchenko.org/grants-and-scholarships/sef-fellows-2025-announcement/. All the Fellows, their affiliations, and their projects can be found on the above link.

It was an honor to, again, serve on the SEF Selection Committee, with Mayhill Fowler as Chair and with committee members: Markian Dobczansky, Kateryna Ruban, Martha Kuchar, Orest Deychakiwsky, and Margarita Balmaceda. The committee worked very hard in evaluating the Fellowship recipients, with 50 awardees selected, each of whom has received $2,000, a six-month affiliation with NTSh-A, a shevchenko.org email address, and a public profile page. An according to the Society webpage: "Fellows are encouraged to participate in the intellectual life of the Society virtually through its events, roundtables, lectures, conferences, and publications, and by interacting with its members in the U.S."

The projects of the Fellows are fascinating and represent many different disciplines and regions of Ukraine, with 4 Fellows being outside of Ukraine. In the case of academics, many different universities in Ukraine are represented. 

Supporting Ukrainian scholarship and culture is critical during wartime and in the future.

We wish all the Fellows all the best on their projects during these very challenging times. 

We hope that donations will enable another round of SEFs in the not too distant future and we pray for peace and victory for Ukraine.