I Enjoyed Giving a Keynote at the Game Theory Conference in Naples, Italy

Last week the game theory SING21 Conference took place at the University of Naples Federico II in Naples, Italy. I was deeply honored to give the opening keynote talk on the first day of the conference. The title of my talk was: "Game Theory, Supply Chains, Labor, and Tariffs: Insights from Variational Inequalities." It was very warm in Naples but the hospitality was even warmer. Many thanks to Professor Annamaria Barbagallo for inviting me, with gratitude also to all the local organizers. It was a delight to see Professor Suresh Sethi of UT Dallas,  whose talk I very much enjoyed, and also Professors Frieda Granot and Daniel Granot from the University of British Columbia as well as Professor Yigal Gerchak from Telaviv University. There were delegates from numerous countries at this game theory conference, in addition to the US and Canada and European countries, including: Thailand, Japan, South Korea, HK, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Israel. The slidedeck of my keynote presentation can be downloaded from the Supernetwork Center website: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/SING-Naples-Nagurney-2026.pdf

I also very much enjoyed the keynote talks by Professors Francis Bloch and Hans Peters and many other presentations. The full program is available on the conference website: https://sites.google.com/view/sing-21

The conference banquet on the Mediterranean with a view of Mt. Vesuvius was fabulous with multiple courses and a delicious chocolate almond cake for dessert. Below are some photos. Professor Annamaria Barbagallo presented me with a lovely gift of a plaque of Mt. Vesuvius!

I am grateful to all those who devote so much time and energy to organizing outstanding scientific conferences in locations that are truly special. Thank you! 

Super Excited to be Presenting at International Conferences this Summer

Conferences are outstanding venues at which to exchange latest research results and ideas, to do networking, and to reconnect with colleagues from around the globe. And, when the conferences are located in beautiful locations, the experiences become even more special and worthwhile.

This summer will be a very busy one. I will soon be presenting 4 talks at 3 different conferences in 2 different countries.

My first talk is the opening keynote talk at the Game Theory Sing21 Conference in Naples, Italy. I am very grateful to Professor Annamaria Barbagallo for the invitation. The title of my keynote is: "Game Theory, Supply Chains, Labor, and Tariffs: Insights from Variational Inequalities."

The program for the conference is now available online: https://sites.google.com/view/sing-21/programme_1/scientific-programme

I will then travel to Linz, Austria to speak at the EUROPT Conference: https://www.jku.at/en/institute-of-business-analytics-and-technology-transformation/conference-europt-2026/ At that conference, I will present a paper that was co-authored with my Isenberg School PhD student, Samira Samadi, which was recently published in the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS). The paper, entitled, "Ad Valorem Tariffs in Global Supply Chain Networks and Impacts on Labor," can be accessed from the journal website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2592758

The IFORS Conferences, which take place only every three years are some of my favorites! IFORS is the umbrella organization for national Operations Research Societies, including INFORMS. And, since the 2026 conference will take place in Vienna, it is one not to be missed. I love Austria and had a Fulbright at SOWI in Innsbruck, Austria. My family and I very much enjoyed living in Austria.

It will be an easy journey from Linz to Vienna.

Working on the two presentations for IFORS was very enjoyable. I would like to take the opportunity to thank Professor Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber for inviting me to speak in the stream: Moments in the History (and Future) of OR. Preparing my presentation, "Highlighting Some Historical Women in OR," took me on a very nostalgic journey since I was blessed to have known some of the truly remarkable female OR pioneers. And my other presentation at this conference is on a paper co-authored with two females: Samira Samadi and Professor Deniz Besik (who was my former PhD student at the Isenberg School): "Fresh Produce Spatial Price Equilibrium on General Networks: Capturing Commodity Quality Deterioration Through Endogenous Transportation Time Delay Functions with Capacities," which was recently published in the European Journal of Operational Research:  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0377221726003759. Of course, in the former presentation, I will highlight the new initiative of  IFORS: GLOW - Global Leadership of Women in Operational Research! 

More information on the IFORS conference can be found on its website: https://www.ifors2026.at/home/

Safe travels, everyone!

I Thoroughly Enjoyed Speaking on Trade Wars and Game Theory at the Great INFORMS Analytics Conference

Conferences can be deeply engaging and energizing and the recent INFORMS Analytics Conference at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center set new standards https://meetings.informs.org/wordpress/analytics/! Many thanks to all those who helped to make this conference a great success!

I love the serendipity of great conferences from the meeting of new colleagues to seeing friends that you did not even realize would be attending! 

There were over 500 attendees and about 60 one hour presentations. I was honored and delighted to be able speak on Trade Wars and Game Theory. Who Wins, Who Loses? The audience was terrific with many excellent, thoughtful questions. And, as promised, I have now posted the slide deck from my presentation: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/Analytics-Nagurney-2026.pdf

I very much enjoyed many of the Edelman Award presentations of the finalists and the networking events. The food was also delicious and the venue was stunning! Engagement of academics with practitioners is critically important and, after I returned, I shared some of the many highlights with the students in my class at the Isenberg School of Management.

Thrilled that Our Paper on Tariffs and Effects on Labor in Supply Chains is Published Free Access in JORS!

My Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Samira Samadi, and I are thrilled that our paper on ad valorem tariffs and their effects on labor in competitive supply chains is now published in the Journal of Operational Research (JORS). JORS is the flagship journal of the Operational Research Society, which is based in the United Kingdom.

The paper is titled, "Ad Valorem Tariffs in Global Supply Chain Networks and Impacts on Labor." The model is a game theory one of firms competing in an oligopolistic manner, each one seeking to maximize its profits, in the presence of tariffs. The firms seek to determine the optimal production of commodities and their distribution as well as the labor needed, with wages and productivity of labor included.

Illustrative examples are provided along with a global soybean trade case study. Numerical results reveal how such tariffs shift trade flows, reshape labor allocation, and affect demand prices as well as profits, with labor shortages and cost disruptions further negatively compounding the effects.

The Editor in Chief, (EIC) of JORS, Kostas Nikolopoulos of Durham University, has kindly made the paper free access and the link to it is below: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2592758

With tariffs having wide impacts, both locally and globally, this is one of the very first papers to quantify the effects on labor, trade flows, and profits. We thank the EIC for the expert handling of our paper as well as the anonymous reviewers who provided valuable feedback on the original paper.

Honored to be a Highly Ranked Scholar, Thanks ScholarGPS

I was delighted to be notified during the holiday season  in an emailed message from ScholarGPS that: Your prolific publication record, the high impact of your work, and the outstanding quality of your scholarly contributions have placed you in the top 0.05% of all scholars worldwide according to the most recent 2025 ScholarGPS.

The notification provided additional information that can also be found on the ScholarGPS website: https://scholargps.com/

ScholarGPS provided me with both my Lifetime ranking - #7 in Supply Chains, #14 in Network Model, and #83 in Business and Management (and also Highly Ranked Scholar in All Fields of Scholarly Endeavor).  I was thrilled to hear that I am  #4 in Game Theory over the past 5 years, a methodological framework that I utilize in much of my supply chain modeling work.

I enjoy doing research tremendously (and publishing both journal articles as well as books plus also OpEds, etc.) and aim to make my research, with great students and collaborators,  relevant to pressing global issues.

Nice to have the following certificates from ScholarGPS:

Our Paper on Tariffs and Labor in Global Supply Chain Networks is Accepted!

We are delighted to report that there is an update on the paper in this post. Today, on the day before Thanksgiving, it was published on the journal website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2592758?src=

There are two streams of research that I have been heavily engaged in and they are the impacts of tariffs on both producers and consumers plus the integration of labor into supply chain networks and I have even published a book on the subject: Labor and Supply Chain Networks: 

https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/bookser/Labor-book.html

I have been working with my PhD student, Samira Samadi, on investigating impacts of tariffs on labor, including employment, and integrating the two streams of research.

I am delighted that, this past week, we heard from the Editor in Chief (EIC) of the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS), Professor Kostas Nikolopoulos of the Durham University Business School in the United Kingdom, that our paper, "Ad Valorem Tariffs in Global Supply Chain Networks and Impacts on Labor," has been accepted in this outstanding journal.

The journal now requires both an abstract and a practitioner abstract and both are below.

We very much enjoyed researching and writing this paper, which also includes a case study on soybeans, and investigates quantitatively the impacts of tariffs on major countries affected, including China and the US. The mathematical model is that of a competitive global supply chain network under oligopolistic competition and the tariffs are ad valorem ones, which are now widely applied to many products, including commodities. 

A preprint of the paper can be found on the Supernetwork Center website: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/articles/TariffsandLaborinGlobalSupplyChainNetworks.pdf

We are grateful to the EIC, the Associate Editors, and to the two anonymous reviewers for the professional handling of our paper and their constructive comments and suggestions.

My Agricultural Supply Chain Networks Under Uncertainty Seminar is Now Online, Thanks to CORS (Canadian Operational Research Society)

I am grateful to Dr. Anjali Aswathi for inviting me to present on April 11, 2025 in a CORS event. Dr. Aswathi is the President of the Canadian Operational Research Society,

The title of my presentation was, "Agricultural Supply Chain Networks Under Uncertainty."

The link to my slide deck for the lecture is here: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/CORS-Nagurney-2025.pdf

The link to the video recording on Youtube is here: https://youtu.be/AIbWpVPM4uU

The above video recording also includes the presentation by Dr. Emma Freninger, which followed my presentation.

It was also very thoughtful of the CORS President to provide the above certificate. 

Thanks to my PhD students and all others who attended our virtual presentations with special thanks to Ismael Pour for writing up some of the highlights on the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter blog: https://websites.umass.edu/umassinf/2025/04/13/two-talks-in-one-day/

Our research on agricultural supply chain networks continues!

The Amazing IFORS Conference in Santiago, Chile

I hope that everyone who took part in the amazing IFORS Conference in Santiago, Chile, which took place July 10-14, 2023, has safely and comfortably returned to their home destinations.

The conference, which is a triennial one, was face to face and attracted over 700 presentations and 900 registrants from around the globe.

Kudos to the Co-Chairs of the Local Organizing Committee: Professors Rafael Epstein and Jorge Vera, and to the Chair of the Scientific Program - Professor Alice Smith and to their teams for putting together such an informative and rich scientific as well as social program. And even the weather cooperated - the winter while we were in Santiago was quite mild.

It has been an incredibly busy several weeks, since, shortly before the IFORS Conference, I had co-organized the Dynamics of Disasters Conference in Greece. 

It was so inspiring to see the great attendance and enthusiasm of the conferees and, I must add that, on my direct flight from Madrid to Santiago on Iberia, there were several conferees from Italy (Paolo Toth, Grazia Speranza, and Claudia Archetti) and, just after passport control, I had the pleasure of seeing the INFORMS President Laura Albert. It was wonderful to stroll to the conference venues and to be greeted and to share greetings with conferees. It was truly special to have exchanges with both Professors Tom Magnanti and Fred Hillier, luminaries in Operations Research.

The below collage was prepared as a memento of the conference.

I was thrilled to see my latest book, "Labor and Supply Chain Networks," on display at the Springer book at the exhibition hall at the conference and very much enjoyed speaking to the Springer Editors: Matt Amboy, Razia Amzad, and Jialin Yan. 

I also very much enjoyed the plenary and keynote sessions as well other sessions plus Editorial Board meetings of both the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) and the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR).

Many thanks to Celso C. Ribeiro, the Editor of ITOR, and to Roman Slowinski, the Editor of EJOR, for such informative meetings!

With the size of the conference and the two venues, I regret that I did not have a chance to speak with as many conferees as I would have liked to. Additional highlights included meeting colleagues that one had interacted with virtually in the pandemic and finally got to meet in person, including the amazing Anand Subramanian, the developer and interviewer behind the outstanding youtube series Subjectto_

And Professor Subrmanian, with some assistance, brought 16 of his special mugs, to present those who were at the conference and had had the pleasure and honor of being interviewed by him! I will treasure my mug. He has, to-date conducted 72 interviews - an extraordinary effort of historical scientific value.

I'd like to thank Professor Margaret Brandeau for her warm introduction to my keynote talk and I am grateful to all those who came to my presentation. I am grateful to my UMass Amherst engineering colleague Professor Chaitra Gopalappa for taking the photo below.

It was wonderful to also see my UMass Amherst engineering colleague Professor Hari Balasubramanian, who, with his wife, were at the same hotel as I in Santiago - the Ismael Hotel.

Some resilience on my part was required, since as I was shampooing my hair, with a head full of lather, the hotel had a pipe break, and there was no water. This happened about 2 hours before my keynote. Resilience comes with being Ukrainian.

I have posted the slide deck of my keynote on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website. In my keynote, I spoke about, among other work, recent research done with my Isenberg School of Management PhD student Dana Hassani and colleagues at the Kyiv School of Economics in Ukraine Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev, which was published in the Journal of Global Optimization.

It was truly special to have my former Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Dmytro Matsypura, who is head of the Business Analytics Department at the University of Sydney in Australia come to my keynote as well as Professor Renata Konrad on WPI and Professor Moldovan of Romania.

Many thanks to IFORS for the incredible work on this conference! The conference website can be accessed here.

Some of the Highlights of the Great POMS Conference in Orlando!

I hope that everyone who took part in the POMS Conference in Orlando, which took place May 22-25, 2023, has returned safely to their homes. It was wonderful to be at this in-person POMS conference, the first such one since the 2019 POMS Conference, which took place in Washington DC.

I thought it important to document some of the highlights of the 33th Annual POMS Conference in Orlando, albeit, of course, from a personal perspective. I am sure that each conferee has their own special memories and experiences. This was truly an international conference and I was delighted to see and meet colleagues from many countries, including from The Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Finland, and even Brazil. Asia was also well-represented. 

I arrived mid-afternoon on Monday and at the Exhibit Hall I was thrilled to see Springer Nature Editor Matt Amboy and the display of Springer books. And there, on display, was my newest book, "Labor and Supply Chain Networks," which was published in 2023.

The venue for the conference was stunning - the Hyatt on International Drive.  The full program for the conference can be accessed here. Below is a photo of a late afternoon view taken from the 26th floor.

I enjoyed the keynote talk by Scott Colloredo, the Director of the Engineering Directorate at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida (but sadly missed the keynote by Dr. Nada Sanders since I was traveling). It was interesting that the 2 keynote talks were both scheduled for last Monday. 

The sessions that I attended were organized in the Humanitarian Operations and Crisis Management track and I especially appreciated the breadth of innovative problems that are being tackled and addressed. Below is a sample.

I thank Dr. Mohammad Arbabian for the invitation to speak in his session. Coincidentally, he is at the Pamplin School of Business at the University of Portland, where my former PhD student, now an Associate Professor there, Dr. Min Yu, is also on the faculty. It was wonderful that she came to our session. Below are photos of the speakers in our session, a group photo, and also a photo with some of the members of the audience. Thanks to all who joined us!

I also enjoyed a panel of editors of the POM journal.

Although there were many conferees that I did not got get a chance to see - the conference was quite large with over 2 dozen parallel sessions, I did, through pure serendipity, encounter and exchange pleasantries with Renzo Akkerman, whom I have cited in quite a few papers on perishable food supply chains co-authored with Min Yu and Deniz Besik (both of whom were in attendance at the conference).

It was also great to see Marianne Jahre of Norway and Sarah Schiffling, who is now at Hanken in Finland. I was with Marianne in Cartagena, Colombia, back in 2019, where we were both invited speakers at a logistics conference organized at the Escuela Naval. I blogged the conference and unique experiences there.

And, of course, sharing meals with Deniz Besik, who is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Richmond, was terrific and also with Min Yu. It was great to have Ladimer S. Nagurney accompany me to the conference!

The title of my presentation at the conference was: "Supply Chain Game Theory Network Modeling Under Labor Constraints: Applications to the COVID-19 Pandemic." The presentation was based on a paper that I authored that was published in the European Journal of Operational Research. I was deeply honored when it received an Editor's Choice Award.

The complete slide deck of my presentation can be downloaded here.

Kudos to the staff at the Hyatt. Their friendliness and professionalism were so appreciated. I very much enjoyed meeting Alexandra from Haiti and Natalia from Lviv, Ukraine, who are working at The Diner at the Hyatt. It was very moving to speak with Natalia in Ukrainian. She had arrived in the US only 6 months ago.

And, it so happens that, next Friday, I will be giving the opening talk at the Innovations in Immigration Analytics Conference at WPI. My talk will be on refugee networks and regulations. Many thanks to Andrew Trapp for inviting me to speak.

And, for those wishing to walk down Memory Lane, please visit my blogpost on the POMS Conference in Washington DC!

Many thanks to the organizers of the POMS Conference for such a rewarding conference both scientifically and socially!

My "Labor and Supply Chain Networks" Book is Published!

I was delighted to receive a shipment of my new book, "Labor and Supply Chain Networks," yesterday. The book was published by Springer Nature and contains 12 chapters, with Acknowledgments, Preface, and an Appendix.

Writing this book was a true labor of love. The book is dedicated to: essential workers and to those fighting for freedom in Ukraine, with gratitude for your heroism. It is the result of many years of  research and writing, accompanied by adrenaline during the COVID-19 pandemic and now the war on Ukraine. 

Springer has produced both hardcopy and online versions, with more information available on the Springer website for the book. I am indebted to Elizabeth Loew of Springer for her outstanding shepherding of this book project with publication even ahead of schedule!

The front matter for the book, with the Preface and the Acknowledgments, is available for free download. In the Acknowledgments, I thank the great Isenberg School Dean Anne P. Massey, the two Operations and Information Management Department Chairs: Professors Bob Nakosteen and Senay Solak, over the period that this book was written, as well as the Vice Provost for Global Affairs at UMass Amherst Kalpen Trivedi, for his leadership of international programs. With the war in Ukraine still raging, and with my service for the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) in Ukraine a very important part of my life, both professionally and personally, I also thank the President of KSE Tymofiy Mylovanov and Rector Tymofii Brik plus KSE colleagues Oleg Nivievskyi and Nataliia Shapoval, who have done extraordinary work on documenting the impacts of the war. 

Collaborators throughout this challenging time have made work fascinating and enjoyable. I am indebted to Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford, Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy, Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Professor Deniz Besik of the University of Richmond, Professor Sara Saberi of WPI, Professor Pritha Dutta of Pace University, and Professor Mojtaba Salarpour of Texas A&M Commerce. All are Center Associates of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I founded in 2001 and continue to direct. Acknowledgments are also extended to my long-time collaborators on Dynamics of Disasters conferences and co-edited volumes: Professor Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida and Professor Ilias S. Kotsireas of Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. I also thank my PhD student Dana Hassani.

Of course, writing a book requires a great deal of focus and time and dedication, and I am so thankful to my family for their support. And, in the pandemic, having a professional society such as INFORMS that helped us to stay connected and informed and also advocated our work to the media and government, was incredible supportive and sustaining.

Workers need to be valued, supported, recognized, and paid for their contributions. Supply chains would collapse without them, as we have seen. I hope that my book, which contains chapters on both profit-maximizing firms and non-profits, including blood service organizations and those in emergency response and disaster management, helps in decision-making as well as policy-making. I believe that students will also appreciate and gain value from the material therein.

I hope that this book will inspire further research as well as implementation in practice of results therein from wages that should be paid to laborers to the productivity investments that should be made for the benefit of workers, consumers, firms, and organizations.

After all, as I wrote in my ORMS Today invited essay (thank you, INFORMS): In the End,  It's All About People!

Celebrating My 23rd PhD Student - Dr. Mojtaba Salarpour

Now is the time of the year in academia, when we mark major milestones, such as the completion of degrees by our students. Yesterday, was a very special day, during which we had the Isenberg School PhD robing ceremony of the class of 2022.

It was wonderful to take part in the ceremony and to speak about my 23rd PhD student, now - Dr. Mojtaba Salarpour! It was the first such in-person ceremony in 3 years because of the pandemic.

The program is below and includes the names of the 6 students from the Isenberg School that received the PhD this past year and the names of their dissertations and their PhD advisors. Impressively, 3 of the 6 are from my Operations and Information Management Department. Mojtaba's concentration in our PhD program was Management Science.

It was nice to see my Department Chair, Professor Senay Solak, at the ceremony and also my 24th PhD student - Dana Hassani.

Mojtaba is from Iran and, while at UMass Amherst, he taught several courses, and was President of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter for 2 years, including 1 1/2 years during the pandemic. He was instrumental in organizing several very interesting virtual panels - one of which was with healthcare researchers from Mass General Hospital and another one was on a career panel. Plus, we had the honor of hosting Dr. Mauricio Resende, Principal Research Scientist of Amazon, in the Chapter's Speaker Series that I help the chapter to organize. Under his tenure as President, the Chapter was recognized with the Magna Cum Laude Award from INFORMS!

Mojtaba's PhD dissertation, "Essays on Supply Chain Economic Networks for Disaster Management Inspired by the Covid-19 Pandemic," constructed several highly relevant game theory models with applications, literally, "drawn from the news." His research, while at UMass Amherst, yielded 4 published papers and 1 published book chapter. I am delighted that he will be an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) at Texas A&M Commerce, starting this Fall. Below, are first pages of his papers.

As I said in my speech about Mojtaba at the ceremony, Mojtaba Salarpour is "standing on the shoulders of giants," since my academic genealogy, by way of my PhD advisor at Brown University, Professor Stella Dafermos, goes back to Maxwell, Newton, and Galileo - so- "no pressure!"

After the ceremony, it was great to enjoy the delicious food provided by UMass Amherst and to see many colleagues, students, and friends!

Congratulations to all the students, Class of 2022, now alums of their alma mater! With best wishes to you on your new journeys with a special congratulations to Dr. Mojtaba Salarpour! I remember fondly the delicious pistachios he brought for me from Iran when he arrived and after he landed in Boston Logan.