Our Paper with Colleagues in Italy on Flexible Production Networks and Environmental Regulations is Published!

It is now the holiday season so one needs to find moments of joy, despite so many horrific events and challenges. I am very grateful to my wonderful collaborators.

The same day as the mass casualty event at my alma mater, Brown University, a paper that I co-authored with colleagues at the University of Catania in Italy: Dr. Gabriella Colajanni, Professor Patrizia Daniele, and Dr. Daniele Sciacca, was published in the European Journal of Operational Research and it is open access: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221725009786

Also, at about the same time, we received a huge package of chocolates from one of these co-authors, which brought light in this time of darkness.

We will be enjoying the chocolates for many weeks and will also be sharing them. 

Thank you for the friendships across the miles and for the outstanding community of Operations Researchers.

Let peace and freedom and righteousness prevail as we come to the end of the 2025 year.

Honored to Have Played a Part in Influencing National Policy on Blood Supply Chains

For quite a few years, my research group and I have been very engaged in studying and writing about blood supply chains. Blood is a unique product that is life-saving and that cannot be produced but must be donated.

Our work on blood supply chains is part of our broader work on perishable product supply chains and we even wrote a book on the topic that was published a decade ago.

During this festive time of the year with the holiday season, there are also often blood shortages, and, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was greatly concerned about the shortages. One day after the WHO declared the pandemic, I published my article, "How coronavirus is upsetting the blood supply chain," in The Conversation. The article was reprinted on multiple news sites, from Live Science to Salon. 

I am deeply humbled and honored that my article on blood shortages in the COVID-19 pandemic, has influenced national policy not once, but twice. On March 31, 2023, 22 Attorneys General signed a memo to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Robert Califf, and my article was cited first

The full memorandum can be accessed here.

Therein is also a citation to the April 22, 2020 memo from 20 Attorneys General, including Maura Healey, now our Massachusetts Governor, to the Honorable Admiral Brett Giroir, MD, at that time the Assistant Secretary for Health, with my article also as the first citation.

On May 11, 2023, the FDA finalized individual risk assessment guidelines for blood donation eligibility. 

In my discipline of Operations Research, as well as in Economics, we try to "Do Good" to improve social welfare and well-being. The tools that we use include analytical techniques, mathematical models, research studies, and, of course, education of students. However, as I often state in invited conference talks and seminars that I give,  it is also critical to get results out where they can be applied.

That is why I continue to write essays and OpEds that can reach a broader community, as my article on blood shortages has.

 I am very glad that the American Red Cross has now adopted a more inclusive blood donation policy, following the FDA recommendations.

 More blood centers are following the FDA revised guidelines with this article, appearing just a few days ago on the PBS News Hour, noting other blood centers following suit, including one in the Pacific Northwest. The donors, who can now give blood, are grateful and, I am sure, the recipients are as well.

Our Recent Research on Human Migration Networks, Climate Change, and Covid-19

The New York Times yesterday published an article, "The Great Climate Migration,"  which stated: As with much modeling work, the point here is not to provide concrete numerical predictions so much as it is to provide glimpses into possible futures. Human movement is notoriously hard to model.

I have been working on the modeling for human migration networks for over 20 years and, in the past year, with collaborators, I have returned to this important topic. Our research was motivated by real-world events. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, by the end of 2019 the number of people forcibly displaced due to war, conflict, persecution, human rights violations, poverty and economic inequality but also climate change and natural disasters, had grown to 79.5 million. Furthermore, the vulnerability of millions of international migrants may be exacerbated in crisis situations, as actually is the case now with the COVID-19, and, of course, by climate change.

In addition,  migration interactions will be the key to achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the member states of the United Nations. In the 2030 Agenda, 9 out of the 17 goals contain targets and indicators that are related to migration or mobility.

In the series of papers, we first set out to include the impacts of regulations on migratory flows and utilities, and took the perspective of migrants behaving in a user-optimizing manner, that is, choosing their locations, subject to the differential between the destination location utility and that in the origin location minus the migration cost. This led us to publishing the paper, "International human migration networks under regulations,"  in the European Journal of Operational Research:

This paper we then extended to include multiple paths between origin and destination nodes, with each path possibly consisting of multiple links. The paper, "Refugee migration networks and regulations: A multiclass, multipath variational inequality framework," was published in the Journal of Global Optimization:

We also introduced, for the first time, a system-optimized perspective for human migration, in which a central authority allocates migrants to locations in a way that is optimal from a societal perspective. In the paper, published in the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR):  "Human migration networks and policy interventions: Bringing population distributions in line with system optimization," we demonstrated how, through policy interventions, in the form of subsidies, a governmental body could ensure that, once imposed the migratory flows (and associated population distributions) would generate a system optimum, although migrants were behaving in a user-optimizing manner.  Those of you well-versed in transportation science can see the analogues.

Subsequently, we included capacities associated with the population locations of the multiclass migrants in the paper, "Capacitated human migration networks and subsidization." The paper has been accepted in the volume:  Dynamics of Disasters - Impact, Risk, Resilience, and Solutions, I.S. Kotsireas, A. Nagurney, and P.M. Pardalos, Editors, Springer International Publishing Switzerland, 2020. This paper shows that the results for the  policy interventions in ITOR also hold in the capacitated case.

And, in our most recent paper on human migration, "A system-optimization model for multiclass human migration with migration costs and regulations in the Covid-19 pandemic," also co-authored with Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy and her PhD student, Giorgia Cappello, we proposed novel utility functions associated with origin an destination nodes and also considered regulations as in the above work. The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically  affected global mobility in the form of blockages, restrictions, and travel disruptions, as risk mitigation measures are being implemented by numerous countries. Indeed, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reports that between 11 March 2020, when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and 20 April 2020, the total number of movement restrictions implemented around the world has increased to more than 48,000! This paper is now under review in a special issues of a journal.

People since time immemorial have sought to identify better locations for themselves and their families. As The New York Times also noted,  our model offers something far more potentially valuable to policymakers: a detailed look at the staggering human suffering that will be inflicted if countries shut their doors.

Research on human migration networks will continue.

Leading by Incentives

Why do some institutions, corporations, and organizations thrive and succeed while others fail?

How do you make such systems at least as great as the sum of their parts?

These are questions that I have been captivated by and struggling with this past year and two major conferences signaled to me that more research and analytics are needed to identify the right incentives to make organizations succeed.

First, I attended John Birge's OMEGA RHO DISTINGUISHED LECTURE, ORMS and Risk Management Failures: What Are We Doing Wrong? that took place at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Austin in November.

Second, I was an invited panelist on Financial Networks at the Measuring Systemic Risk Conference hosted by the University of Chicago and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in December that was organized by Andrew Lo of the Sloan School of MIT, Lars Hansen of the University of Chicago, and David Marshall of the Chicago Fed. Joining me on the financial networks panel were: my colleague Mila Getmansky Sherman, Sujit Kapadia of the Bank of England, and Kimmo Soramaki of Financial Network Analyttics. (And John Birge was in the audience.)

As was vividly brought out in these and accompanying presentations and ensuing discussions: events contributing to the global financial crisis and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill appear to represent cataclysmic failures of risk management within some of the most technologically capable organizations. In retrospect, even the most basic analysis should have avoided these disasters and their enduring consequences. Why then did these catastrophes occur and what can be done to prevent such (and other) disasters?

Clearly, these are system issues.

As someone who researches and teaches about network systems, there is a striking difference in the outcomes under user-optimization, when individuals seek to determine their best allocation of resources subject to their own desires and goals, and those under system-optimization, in which the best allocation of resources so as to achieve the system's goals are determined.

In transportation, we know that we can identify the proper policies, in the form of prices, as in the form of tolls, so that when assigned, individuals will behave in a way that is now optimal from a system (or societal) perspective.

When we look back on financial disasters and institutional failures (or underachievement) there is often a misalignment between the stated goals of the organization and those of individuals who work for the organization. So, shadow systems evolve, in which individuals, think stockbrokers, and even professors, maximize their own utility and, as a consequence, the system is driven to states unreflective of its goals.

Indeed, stockbrokers were rewarded/paid for not maximizing either shareholders' wealth or their firm's profits, but rather their own wealth, thus precipitating the financial collapse (and as Paul Krugman said because of malign neglect).

Similarly, faculty at some universities are rewarded through additional financial compensation for teaching online courses over and above their regular teaching loads; in some cases, doubling or tripling their salaries. What then happens to the research output of such faculty?

There are only so many hours in a day and a week and faculty may choose the risk-free option of teaching extra online. The stature of the school then suffers as research declines.

Without the right incentives, or regulatory controls, shadow banks and shadow schools are operating, rewarding those who have the personal and political connections internally, and sacrificing the integrity and sustainability of the system.

As a graduate student who is very observant recently said to me, "Why is the personal becoming professional? Shouldn't professional accomplishments merit the promotions and rewards instead?"

Leaders of corporations and universities must identify the right incentives or face failure.