Two Experts in "Room for Debate" on the UN Population Report Cite My Work

I always enjoy reading the "Room for Debate" in The New York Times, which focuses on experts debating timely topics with comments by readers.

The latest "Room for Debate" topic is on the recently released UN report on the world's population projected to increase to 10.1 billion by 2100. Two of those providing commentary are Dr. Joel Cohen of the Rockefeller University and Dr. Brad Allenby of Arizona State University.

Interestingly, both have cited my work -- Dr. Cohen in his work on the Braess paradox with Frank Kelly, and Dr. Allenby in his work at the Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management.

In fact, Dr. Allenby, while he was at AT&T, announced my Industrial Ecology Award, which helped to support the founding of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I direct. I actuallly received two of these awards, in subsequent years, and enabled some very interesting research on environmental supernetworks and electronic recycling.

The First INFORMS Northeast Regional Conference Begins Tomorrow!

The First Northeast Regional INFORMS Conference begins tomorrow and takes place at UMass Amherst.

The full program and additional information can be found here.

The UMass publication, In the Loop, had a nice article on the conference.

The conference will begin tomorrow morning at 8:00AM with remarks by Dr. Hari Balasubramanian of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at UMass Amherst, who is the Chair of the Conference.

Dr. Mark Fuller, the Dean of the Isenberg School of Management, will also make some remarks. Then it will be time for the first of two plenary talks, given by Dr. David Simchi-Levy of MIT. Dr. Alex "Sandy" of the Media Lab at MIT will give his plenary in the afternoon and I will have the pleasure of introducing him.

There will be several panels tomorrow. I will be taking part in the research panel in the afternoon with Dr. Mary Helander of IBM, Dr. Les Servi, the conference program co-chair, who is from MITRE, and Dr. Amr El-Bakry of Exxon-Mobil.

The UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter is helping out as well so it should be a wonderful experience for our students.

And, one of the highlights for me is that I don't even have to pack a suitcase and can sleep in my own bed since the conference is at UMass!

The UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Party Was Wonderful!

The semester has ended and the exams are beginning soon.

We celebrate the "end of the semester" by hosting a party filled with international cuisine, students, faculty, staff, and great conversation.

Today, we had our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter party at the Isenberg School and I will let the photos above speak for themselves.

A great time was had by all and I commend the students for doing so much at this busy time of the year!

We also honored our hard-working student chapter officers.

Congrats to the 2011 Newly Elected National Academy of Sciences Members!

Congratulations to the 2011 newly elected National Academy of Sciences members!

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) just released the list and I am very pleased to see that the list includes Professor Stuart Geman of the Applied Mathematics Department at Brown University (I have 3 degrees from that department and know Professor Geman as well as his brother, Professor Don Geman) and Professor Jon Kleinberg of the Computer Science Department at Cornell (who I recently invited to give a keynote at our SBP 2011 conference but he had to graciously decline).

There are 72 new members and 18 foreign associates from 15 countries who were elected by a vote at the NAS conference that just finished today in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. There are quite a few biologists, chemists, and physicists on the list.

The POMS Conference in Reno, Nevada a Big Success!

The 2011 POMS Conference took place in Reno, Nevada, April 29-May 2 with the theme Operations Management -- The Enabling Link.

As one of my doctoral students, who attended the conference, said: We had a great time at the POMS conference. Thank you very much for providing us with this precious opportunity. The doctoral student consortium was amazing and informative. Most of the participants (>30 out of 40) are third year PhD students. I met students from other universities, such as from UT Dallas, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Syracuse University, and the University of Alabama, etc. Four panelists introduced their experiences in the job market, and we learned how to balance research, teaching, and service. We were told that the link to the slides of their presentations will be sent to us soon.

Conferences are so valuable for exchanging the latest research, for making new connections, and for networking! It is especially important for students to have opportunities to present their research at conferences so that they appreciate the atmosphere of scholarly exchanges and interactions.

The photos above were provided by two pf my doctoral students who spoke at the POMS Conference in a healthcare session. In the photos are even several of our UMass Amherst PhDs who are now professors! It's wonderful to see how their network is growing and how the friendships made during their doctoral studies provide them with linkages during their professional careers.

Congrats to the organizers of the POMS Conference in Reno!

UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Hosts Spring 2011 Party!

I am delighted to announce that the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter will be hosting its end of the semester party this coming Wednesday at the Isenberg School. The students have designed the flyer above and the invitation below went out to several e-lists. We will be honoring our hard-working Student Chapter officers at this event as well.

Please join us if you can and don't forget the First Northeast Regional INFORMS Conference that is taking place at UMass Amherst, May 6-7, 2011! The UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter is helping out with this conference, as well.


Dear Professors, Staff, Members and Students:

In appreciation of your support of the UMASS Amherst Student Chapter of INFORMS, we cordially invite you to the Spring End of Semester Party to be held at the Isenberg School of Management.

Date: Wednesday, May 4th, 2011
Time: 5:00PM - 7:00PM
Place: Isenberg School of Management Room 112

The party will give us the opportunity to show our appreciation and to conclude the semester with great food and lively conversations. Again, we would like to thank the staff, faculty and administrators who have supported us.

We hope to see you there!

UMASS Amherst Student Chapter of INFORMS


INFORMS Student Chapter website:
http://student.som.umass.edu/informs/

Supply Chain Risk, Mergers and Acquisitions, and Synergy

Risk in the context of supply chains may be associated with the production/procurement processes, the transportation/shipment of the goods, and/or the demand markets. Such supply chain risks are directly reflected in firms' financial performances, and priced in the financial market. For example, it has been estimated that the average stock price reaction to supply-demand mismatch announcements was approximately -6.8%. In addition, supply chain disruptions can cause firms' equity risks to increase by 13.50% on average after the disruption announcements.

So how should we measure risk with uncertainties today associated with exchange rates, production disruption frequencies, and/or material and energy prices?

We take a mean-variance (MV) approach to the measurement of risk, which dates to the work of the Nobel laureate Markowtiz (1952, 1959) and which even today, according to my finance colleagues, Schneeweis, Crowder, and Kazemi (2010), remains a fundamental approach to minimizing volatility. The MV approach has been increasingly used in the supply chain management literature to study decision-making under risk and uncertainty.

In a recent study of ours, "Risk Reduction and Cost Synergy in Mergers and Acquisitions via Supply Chain Network Integration," Dr. Zugang Liu and I developed supply chain network models that allow decision-makers to minimize both total expected costs and risks associated with their supply chain network activities both prior to and post a merger or acquisition. In addition, we developed three synergy metrics to assess a potential merger or acquisition (M&A) a priori. These measures capture, respectively, the expected total cost synergy, the absolute risk synergy, and the relative risk synergy.

We focused on supply chain network models since it has been estimated that 80% of a firm's expenses is due to operations.

Since we can expect additional M&As in emerging countries as well as in the developed ones, especially in the healthcare, high tech, and energy sectors, such metrics can be valuable.

Our study has been accepted in the Journal of Financial Decision Making and we will be presenting it next Friday at the First Northeast Regional INFORMS Conference at UMass Amherst in an invited session on Risk Management: Interfaces Between Finance and Operations.

The numerical simulations in our study reveal interesting managerial insights for executives who are faced with M&A decisions. Our first set of examples showed that if the expected total costs and the risks of the merger are negligible, both the total cost and the total risk would be reduced through the merger. In addition, the risk reduction achieved through the merger was more prominent when the uncertainty of link costs was higher.

Our second set of examples showed that the cost and the risk of merger could have a significant impact on the total cost and the total risk of the post-merger firm, and should be carefully evaluated. Our examples also demonstrated that whether a merger makes sense economically may depend on the priority concerns of the decision-makers, and on the measures used to evaluate the gains. For instance, a merger that could not lower the expected total cost might still be able to reduce the total risk, and, hence, be considered beneficial to the firms' stakeholders.