The Doug and Maria DeVos Faculty Summer Support Award in Global Supply Chain Management has generously awarded $25,000 to two faculty each year in support for research with themes revolving around Global Supply Chain Management, conducted over the summer academic break. This important sponsorship has been funded since 2005 and has benefited a diverse set of faculty from across the Krannert School of Management. Without these vital funds, chosen faculty would have been unable to carry out their important mission of looking at Global Supply Chain Management thorough a rigorous academic lens, innovating new approaches and applying fresh solutions.

Each year, the research style has varied from theory development to empirical research based on primary or secondary data sets. While the primary purpose of the research funding was aimed at enabling faculty to pursue their research agenda, which complements the GSCMI’s mission, additional incentive has been provided to researchers willing to broadly communicate the results of their summer work to DCMME/GSCMI center partners through the annual Fall Operations Conference.

The summary of researchers and their DeVos Research overviews that follow are a tribute not only to the academic capability that can be found at the Krannert School of Management, but also to the entire DeVos family, for which this work is dedicated.

We are proud to have been the guardians of the DeVos Faculty Summer Support Award in Global Supply Chain Management for its 5-year term (2005-2010), and are equally proud of the strong works that were born due to the DeVos’s family leadership in promoting research in the field of Global Supply Chain Management studies.

The following Purdue faculty member is the Devos Award Recipient for the 2010 year.

David Hummels

Professor of Economics

Ph.D., Economics, University of Michigan, 1995
M.A., Economics, University of Michigan, 1992
B.A. summa cum laude, Political Science and Economics

Research Topic: Disorganization and Diversification in Global Supply Chains

The 2010 proposed research will study the evolution of global supply chain complexity at industrial and economy-wide levels.  Dr. Hummels will examine how the extent and growth of that complexity is a response to the competing imperatives of comparative advantage and diversification, and also examine whether highly interconnected global supply chains dampen or heighten the international transmission of business cycle shocks.  

Professor Hummels’ teaching interest is in international economics. His research focuses on empirical investigations in international trade, with a special emphasis on product differentiation, barriers to trade, and the effects of transportation and infrastructure on trade and economic development.

Dr. Hummels is a two-time DeVos Research Award recipient, receiving his first award in 2006 for the research topic of Valuing Timeliness in Global Supply Chains.

Vinayak Deshpande

Assistant Professor of Management

Ph.D., Operations Management, Wharton School
M.A., Managerial Economics, Wharton School
M.S., Operations Research, Columbia University
B.Tech, Mechanical Engineering, I.I.T. Bombay

Research Topic: The Impact of Retail Competition and Correlation of Capacity and Allocation in Decentralized Supply Chains

Professor Deshpande teaches operations management. His research interests are in the areas of supply chain coordination, service parts management, and contingency logistics systems. His other topics of study include military applications and inventory models. His current research papers include “A Threshold Rationing Policy for Service Differentiated Demand Classes,” Management Science; “Incentive Compatible Pricing Mechanisms for Service Differentiated Supply Chains,” and “An Empirical Study of Service Differentiation for Weapon System Service Parts.” Professor Deshpande is a member of INFORMS and M&SOM. He is also a member of honor societies Tau Beta Pi and Alpha Pi Mu. He has refereed research papers for journals including Management Science, EJOR, and IIE Transactions. Professor Deshpande completed his Ph.D. at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania in 2000. As a part of his Ph.D., he was involved in an extensive supply chain coordination project with the U.S. Navy and the Defense Logistics Agency. He has also worked as a financial engineer at the Bank of Nova Scotia, N.Y. He is currently working on a research project funded by NSF on “Contingency Logistics Systems” along with Professors Iyer and Thomas.

Zhulei Tang

Assistant Professor of Management

Ph.D., Information Systems, Carnegie Mellon University
M.S., Industrial Administration (Information Systems)
M.A., Economics, Boston College
B.A., Economics, Peking University (China)

Research Topic: Managing Multichannel Communications: A Field Experimental Study of Emails and Catalogs

Professor Tang joined the Krannert faculty in 2006. Her areas of interest include information systems, electronic commerce, telecommunication and network management, database management, IS strategy, and system analysis and design. She received a William Larimer Mellon Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon, and a Graduate School Fellowship and Summer Fellowship at Boston College.

Arnab Bisi

Assistant Professor of Management

Ph.D., Mathematics and Statistics, Hong Kong University
M.S., Statistics, Indian Statistical Institute
B.S., Statistics, University of Calcutta, India

Research Topic: Global Supply Chain Management with Unknown Demand DistributionOctober 23, 2008

Professor Bisi’s teaching interests include statistics, management science, stochastic modeling, multivariate analysis, and forecasting. His current research focuses on inventory control, stochastic modeling, supply chain management, and production planning. His current publications include “The Censored Newsvendor and the Optimal Acquisition of Information” with Martin L. Puterman and Xiaomei Ding, Operations Research, (2002); “Average Cost Optimality for an Unreliable Two-Machine Flowshop with Limited Internal Buffer” with Ernst Presman, Suresh P. Sethi and Hanquin Zhang, Annals of Operations Research, (2000); and “Stability of Degenerate Diffusions with State-Dependent Switching” with Gopal K. Basak and Mrinal K. Ghosh, Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, (1999). Prior to Krannert, Professor Bisi was a visiting assistant professor of management science at the A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management, University of California (2001-02). He received the COE-MITACS Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada (19992001). He is a member of INFORMS and MSOM.

Yu Hu

Assistant Professor of Management

Ph.D., Management Science, M.I.T.
M.S., Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
B.S., Finance, Tsinghua University

Research Topic: Website Features and Online Shopping: How Technology Usage Impacts Consumer Demand
October 23, 2008

Yu (Jeffrey) Hu is an assistant professor at Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management.

His research studies how Internet markets differ from traditional markets and how businesses should adapt their strategies in response to the unique characteristics of Internet markets. He has also written papers that study Internet advertising, pricing of information goods, and privacy protection regimes on the Internet.

His research has been published in leading journals such as Management Science, Sloan Management Review, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Economic Inquiry. His research on the "Long Tail" phenomenon on the Internet has been discussed extensively and cited by media outlets such as New York Times, InformationWeek, Wired Magazine, TIME Magazine, and INC. Magazine. He has conducted research for a number of companies including Amazon, HP, and several Internet retailing companies. He recently won a Willis Young Faculty Scholar Award at Krannert School of Management.

Dr. Hu received his Ph.D. in Management Science and Information Technology from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Prior to coming to Purdue University, he worked for MIT’s Center for Digital Business. He received a B.S. degree in Finance with the honor of Outstanding Graduating Student from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and received a M.S. degree in Economics from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Hu teaches an MBA course--Digital Business and Information Strategies (MGMT 590S) and an undergraduate course--Electronic Commerce and Information Strategies (MGMT 488) at Krannert School of Management.