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!