Thrilled to Receive the Galleys for Our Tariffs, Rerouting, and Supply Chain Paper for the Rockafellar Volume

It has been a very busy "winter break" with the revising of a 50 page paper with collaborators, the reviewing of multiple journal articles, and also the handling of papers submitted to journals as an Associate Editor. And, of course, the holiday season, with the accompanying festivities also needed attention! Plus, I have also been busy updating my lectures for two classes that I will be teaching this spring at the Isenberg School of Management.

I was delighted to receive from the publisher Springer galleys for the paper, "Multicommodity Trade, Tariffs, and Rerouting," which is in press as a chapter for a very special edited volume in honor of Tyrrell "Terry" Rockafellar on the occasion of his 90th birthday! The volume is titled, "Convex and Variational Analysis with Applications." The volume is edited by Professors Rassias and Pardalos and was originally scheduled for publication in mid December 2025 but now the publication date on the Springer page is March 16, 2026: https://link.springer.com/book/9783032078599.

The paper, which I co-authored with my Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Samirasadat "Samira" Samadi, will be chapter 16 in this special volume.

The galleys (I was delighted) were in great shape and no changes were needed!

Thanks to the typesetters for their outstanding work. We are very much looking forward to the publication of this volume, which I am hearing will have 27 chapters.

Why We Wrote the Competing on Supply Chain Quality Book

I was thrilled when my new book, "Competing on Supply Chain Quality: A Network Economics Perspective," was published last month by Springer. The book was co-authored with my former doctoral student at the Isenberg School of Management, Dong Li, who is now an Assistant Professor at the School of Business at Arkansas State University. The book is the second book in the new Springer Series on Supply Chain Management that is edited by Distinguished University Professor Christ Tang of UCLA's Anderson School of Management.

We had conducted research on supply chain networks with a focus on quality for over half a decade.

The book was published last month, June 2016, and a box of copies arrived at the Isenberg School but I was at Oxford University as a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College for the Trinity term. Luckily, Christine Crigler of Springer was gracious to express mail two copies to me at Oxford.  Although this is my 13th book, the excitement of seeing the package and opening it up and then looking through your new book is always thrilling.

My co-author at that time was still visiting China but upon my return to Massachusetts, we were delighted to see each other and to look at the book together.

Writing the book was a passion and it was done in the US, while I was also in Sweden, as a Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg, and everything was finalized recently.

The study of supply chains, a critical area of both operations research and operations management has, interestingly, evolved completely separately from the literature on quality management, another much studied topic in operations management that has a long history. Moreover, there had been numerous instances of product failures that had resulted in not only such negative effects on humans as illnesses but even death. Consumers, when they purchase infant formula want to make sure that it is safe; the same holds for the cars that we drive, the food that we eat, and the high technology products that we use, to start.  Frankly, in many cases when we would read news articles, noting medicines that not only did not do the job that they were designed for but actually injured people, or airbags that would explode and injure people, or ignition switches that resulted in accidents and the death of young people, we were, frankly, furious!

As scholars and educators what we can do is do research so we began to develop supply chain network models that were realistic and that were computable. This was critical since much of the literature would consider only very small supply chains that one would never see in practice (but might be easy to solve and get some insights for). Clearly, producers in many cases would have more information about the products that they had manufactured than consumers would so we explored information asymmetry and also the impacts of minimum quality standards. An issue in our work that was fundamental was to give a precise definition of what we meant by quality. Quality sometimes has a rather qualitative flavor and we cared about quantitative measures.  W also wanted to quantify the impact on a firm's reputation if there were quality failures of is products. In contrast to much of the other literature, we also considered decentralized decision-making as opposed to centralized decision-making. Hence, we utilized network theory, optimization theory, and also, importantly, game theory to explore competition.

Our passion for product quality and the reality of globalization and outsourcing also drove us to develop supply chain network models with explicit supplier selection and make or buy decision-making and associated quality.  We were also able to develop a framework, which I am very proud of, that identifies the importance of suppliers to a firm's supply chain network and that of the supplier to the supply chain network economy. Clearly, one can then rank suppliers accordingly and, this provides decision-makers with important tools of assessment. Pay attention to those suppliers that affect you bottom line, should their production be disrupted, be it because of natural disasters  or other events.

Of course, since transportation has always been my love, along with logistics, we also explored the meaning of quality in freight. You want to make sure that Christmas trees arrive in time for the holiday, that the goods that you ordered are not damaged, and that the food does not spoil in transit!

Our research was documented in a series (many) papers since this was essential to get peer review done. After close to a dozen papers on the paper it became essential to synthesize all of our material and the book was the result.

The passion for product quality and supply chain networks continues as will the research.

Another thrill was seeing our book on display at the EURO 2016 conference in Poznan, Poland, which took place July 3-6, 2016, and which I wrote enthusiastically about in a previous blogpost. 

And, yesterday, we celebrated the publication of our book in a meaningful way and I expect there will be more celebrations.

Thanks to UMass Amherst for noting our new book by the News Office. This was a great collaboration, which continues.

John Nash's Last Book and the Operations Research Connections via Greece

Our terrific Dynamics of Disasters conference, which took place in Kalamata, Greece, in now over. It was such a pleasure working on this conference with my fellow co-organizers, Professor Panos M. Pardalos and Professor Ilias Kotsireas.

While there, I learned of some quite surprising news,which further supports the small world hypothesis (at least when it comes to our terrfic operations research community).

While at one of our nice get-togethers at the conference (I have posted many photos on the blog in previous posts), we reinisced about John Nash, the Nobel laureate, who tragically died in a taxi crash in New Jersey, along with his wife, after returning from Oslo, Norway, where he was honored with the Abel Prize. I wrote about receiving this shocking news while in Gothenburg, Sweden. 

John Nash greatly influenced so much of my work in competitive supply chains and game theory and he is also referenced many times in the book that I am presently writing.

Professor Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida, who is renowned in operations research, told me at one of our get-togethers in Kalamata that he commissioned John Nash's last book for Springer.

The book, "Open Problems in Mathematics," is co-edited by Michael Rassias and John Nash. In fact, Princeton University, in its many tributes to Nash, mentioned the book and this article contains a photo of Rassias with Nash.  Rassias speaks eloquently of the kindness of Nash and how he plans to emulate him. Rassias and Nash had just completed the foreword to their book before Nash left for Oslo. According to the Princeton tribute:

They agreed upon a quote from Albert Einstein that resonated with Nash (although Nash pointed out that Einstein was a physicist, not a mathematician, Rassias said): "Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning."

Professor Ilias Kotsireas of Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada (who worked tirelessly in making our conference a success) shared with me  the photo below of him with John Nash and with Professor Stephen M. Watt, currently the Dean of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Nash was one of 4 invited speakers at the ECCAD 2008 conference at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, WV., at which the above photo was taken.

Keeping with the small world theme of this post, Michael Rassias, who is a postdoc fellow at Princeton University, is the son of Professor Themistocles M. Rassias, who was a co-organizer of the conference in Athens, Greece, in the summer of 2013 on Network Models in Economics and Finance at which I was a plenary speaker.

That conference banquet took place at the magnificent "new" Acropolis museum, with a view of the Parthenon; see photo below. Pardalos was also a co-organizer of that conference.

Our paper, "A Supply Chain Game Theory Framework for Cybersecurity Investments Under Network Vulnerability," A. Nagurney, L.S. Nagurney, and S. Shukla, will appear in the volume, Computation, Cryptography, and Network Security, which is co-edited by N. J. Daras and  M. Th. Rassias, and is in press with Springer.

And, would you believe, that a contributor to the volume of Nash's last book is Professor Stephen Miller of Williams College,  who is married to my Marketing colleague at the Isenberg School of Management, Professor Liz Miller!

Networks Against Time -- Our New Book is Published!

Yesterday was not only Valentine's Day, but it was also the day that the first shipment of our new book, "Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products," published by Springer, arrived.

The book had already been posted online, in chapter format by the publisher, but the feeling, filled with expectation, of opening the box and then unwrapping the packaging to see the finished product, over which we had  labored hard and long, was very special.

Writing a book is like giving birth (I guess that only females can use this analogy). You hope that, when the time comes, the "child" is healthy and will be with you for a long time. It also takes teamwork -- my co-authors: Min Yu, Amir H. Masoumi, and Ladimer S. Nagurney, made this multidisciplinary approach to supply chains ranging from food to pharma to fast fashion to medical nuclear supply chains and even blood supply chains possible.

The journey of this book, in terms of production, was filled with suspense, since it was emailed in electronic format to the publisher in NYC and then Superstorm Sandy struck, and the Springer offices were without power. I did not even dare to ask about the flooding (the address is on Spring Street). After a few days, I received an acknowledgment that the offices would reopen.

Then, after copyediting, which required some transcontinental communications, and  the correction of the galleys, it was time for production, both virtual (website-based) and physical.

Those of you in the Northeast know that we are still digging out from Blizzard Nemo, so, clearly, there were delays in deliveries because of the road and travel conditions.

This is my 10th book and whether it is your very first or n-th, the feeling of accomplishment is satisfying.

The Supernetworks book that I wrote with June Dong and was published by Edward Elgar in 2002, was sent to our publisher in the United Kingdom just before 9/11. In those days, we did camera-ready copies on special paper, and the parcel that I had mailed was at the JFK airport until flights were allowed to resume.

The Networks Against Time  book I dedicate, posthumously, to my amazing uncle, Mr. Stanley E. Jarosz, who at age 92, was still working for a bridge engineering firm in Manhattan, living on 57th Street, and regularly going to concerts and operas at Lincoln Center. He was a refugee from Ukraine and fled during WWII to Vienna and made his way to the US. He died on February 13, 2013. Several of the bridges that he designed in the US received major awards. He had also been a licensed pilot -- the love of transportation and logistics must be in our family's genes.

In the last conversation that I had had with him -- he was not even ailing and, just over the past several days, required hospice care -- he asked me when I was going to write another book. I told him that my 10th would be out soon. He died  in Colorado, with his son looking over him. He had moved from Manhattan seven months ago after retiring and missed work tremendously.

That night, I could not sleep for several hours -- unknowingly -- and coinciding with his passing. We had spoken with his son (my cousin)  only hours before and I thought that my uncle would still be with us for a week or so.

Uncle Stanley (or Stacho as we called him in Ukrainian), this book is for you!

Today, I will be speaking in the Computational Social Science Seminar Series at UMass Amherst and I had a deja vu. When my dissertation advisor, Professor Stella Dafermos, who was the first female professor at Brown University in the School of Engineering and the Division of Applied Math (and for the historians of science out there -- also the second female to receive a PhD in Operations Research in the world) passed away, I was a Visiting Scholar at the Sloan School at MIT. I received the news of her passing in a phone call from her husband and that very afternoon I gave a talk in the Operations Research Center seminar series at MIT.

Not easy, but such mentors as Stella and my uncle Stanley, who demonstrated remarkable resilience, and true intellect, taught us well.

And I did receive the lovely bouquet of flowers pictured below yesterday as well.