Subodha Kumar

• PhD
• Paul R. Anderson Distinguished Chair Professor at Temple University

We describe the process used to identify the ten most influential papers published in the Production and Operations Management ( POM) journal in its first thirty years. We also briefly discuss and highlight the selected papers.

Consumer showrooming has become a common phenomenon in the retail industry, but little is known about its influence on the interplay between an upstream supplier and a downstream retailer in a distribution channel. Our study examines such an influence by considering an upstream supplier who sells a product through a downstream physical retailer bas...

Clocking-in cash-back (CIC), an emerging gamified business model in online learning, has recently garnered significant attention. CIC allows users to secure a full refund of the course fee through consecutive completion of specific tasks within a required time window. These tasks, known as clocking in, encompass activities such as daily assignments...

With the growing popularity of e-commerce, nearly every prominent retailer is aiming to turn omni-channel. One crucial decision in this pursuit is the identification of the joint assortment. In this study, we contribute by examining joint assortment and product prices for a retailer that sells products through both brick-and-mortar and online chann...

The growing online retail market has led to the prevalence of multichannel retailing. Meanwhile, retailers are increasingly combining multichannel retailing with a multibranding strategy. Although this can further increase the retailer’s sales, it brings new advertising challenges. Multibrand, multichannel retailers usually launch advertising campa...

This research delves into the impact of real-time feedback applications on the engagement of employees with performance evaluation programs. The study focuses on feedback-seeking behavior and rating, which have been neglected in previous literature. The research analyzes nearly 11,000 feedback instances from employees at four major organizations to...

As the industrial Internet-of-things (IIoT) is becoming increasingly valuable, manufacturers are eager to establish IIoT-based platforms for preventative maintenance (PM). These platforms reposition the roles of manufacturers and reshape the patterns of the after-sales service market. Manufacturers can adopt either the competitive strategy by intro...

In this paper, we provide brief summaries of the papers included in the special issue on “Business Analytics: Emerging Practice and Research Issues.” There are eight papers, including this one, published in the special issue. We also categorize papers across different themes and present emerging research directions for business analytics‐related pr...

Since the inaugural issue published in 1992, Production and Operations Management (POM) has grown phenomenally in terms of the number of submissions and publications and journal impact factor. In this 30th anniversary issue of the journal, contributing authors examine the past and the future of operations management (OM) research, addressing emergi...

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is one of the most serious and prevalent health issues all over the world. The evolution of CKD can last for many years until the death of patients, and the method of treatment mainly includes medication, dialysis, and transplantation with the evolution of the disease. It has been validated by many empirical studies tha...

The new age economy is primarily driven by Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0, which facilitate smartification of organizations by helping them integrate and automate decision making. Recent advances in information and communication technologies, such as the cloud, big data, internet of things, and artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, have accele...

Health information exchanges (HIEs) are designed to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare by facilitating improved information sharing between health entities. This study systematically examines the impact of HIE use in emergency departments (EDs) on the quality and efficiency of medical care. We focus on the length of stay (LOS) and the...

The growing complexity of consulting, new product development, and information technology projects has led firms to increasingly adopt the strategy of collaborative value cocreation with their vendors. Although such value cocreation often involves a client firm engaging with more than one vendor, research in this field has primarily focused on sing...

Online healthcare portals have become prevalent worldwide in recent years. One common form of healthcare portal is the online consultation website, which provides a bridge between patients and doctors and reduces patients’ time and cost when seeking healthcare services. Another form is the healthcare service appointment website, which facilitates o...

Care coordination involves shaping patient care activities and sharing information among all participants concerned with a patient's care to achieve safe and effective care. The objectives of care coordination are to promote sharing of patients’ clinical information, keep patients and families informed, and manage effective referrals and care trans...

Software‐as‐a‐Service (SaaS) applications have experienced a decade of explosive growth, eliminating barriers in reaching users and enabling real‐time interchanges and intelligence. Using business analytics, SaaS applications are increasingly embedded in the day‐to‐day activities of businesses and consumers with competition and innovative pricing....

Governments and healthcare organizations increasingly pay attention to social media for handling a disease outbreak. The institutions and organizations need information support to gain insights into the situation and act accordingly. Currently, they primarily rely on ground‐level data, collecting which is a long and cumbersome process. Social media...

Reduction in hospital readmissions has long been identified as a target area for healthcare public policy reform by the U.S. government. In October 2012, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) established the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) program, which requires the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to reduce payments to hosp...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had profound effects on grocery retailers, forcing them to make many operational changes in response to public health concerns and the shift in customers' shopping behavior. Grocery retailers need to understand the impact of pandemic conditions on their operations, but the literature has not modeled and analyzed this issue...

The Covid-19 pandemic is triggering several supply chain disruptions that have a tremendous impact on firms’ activities. Consequently, firms have pushed suppliers to develop their disruption orientation through the exchange of information and collaboration with the aim to enhance their own performance. Although this is important from the industry p...

Firms and organizations are increasingly using real-time performance feedback mechanisms to evaluate employees, where any employee (rather than just the supervisor) can rate other employees. Hence, a need arises to better understand how network positions of employees in such a system impact their performance. Analyzing nearly 4,000 feedback instanc...

The COVID‐19 pandemic has had profound effects on grocery retailers, forcing them to make many operational changes in response to public health concerns and the shift in customers' shopping behavior. Grocery retailers need to understand the impact of pandemic conditions on their operations, but the literature has not modeled and analyzed this issue...

Firms of all sizes are “joining the conversation” on social media platforms and increasingly trademarking hashtags related to their products and brands. This added effort to protect intellectual property and its impact on social media engagement have not been investigated in the literature. In this study, we find that trademarking hashtags plays a...

In the Industry 4.0 era, automation and data analytics emerge as the major forces to enhance efficiency in operations management (OM). Disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, blockchain, 3D printing, 5G and Internet-of-Thing (IoT), digital twins, and augmented reality (AR), are widely applied. They potentially will...

We propose social pricing, a novel pricing framework under which consumers with higher social capital enjoy a better price. Conceptually, social pricing enables firms to achieve price discrimination based on a consumer’s social value. This is in sharp contrast with traditional price discrimination strategies where price differentiation typically hi...

Despite numerous optimization techniques proposed to address inventory record inaccuracy (IRI), there continues to be a lack of empirical appreciation of IRI, nor do existing item-level inspection policies accommodate managerial needs for allocating inspection effort to groups of items. We address these issues by collaborating with a retailer to co...

Hunger occurs in all locations around the globe, from developing to developed countries. In fact, there were over 37 million food insecure individuals (those without access to consistent, nutritious food) in the United States in 2018 and this number increased in recent years due to the COVID pandemic. In many countries, food banks are used to conso...

Recent years have seen robust growth in online medical consultation platforms. These platforms allow patients to access various healthcare services provided by doctors (e.g., health assessment, diagnosis, consultation, and supervision). In China, many such platforms allow patients to give small monetary gifts to doctors as an expression of gratitud...

Many firms buy cloud services from cloud vendors, such as Amazon Web Services to serve end users. One of the key factors that affect the quality of cloud services is congestion. Congestion leads to a potential loss of end users, resulting in lower demand for cloud services. Although discount can stimulate demand, its effect under congestion is ambi...

As more customers purchase pre-owned apparel, firms are increasingly adopting resale based business models. These models typically operate as either (i) a trade-in and resale program, wherein a firm offers a trade-in discount on a new product and resells the traded-in products, or (ii) a P2P resale marketplace where customers can buy and sell used...

Breast cancer remains the leading cause of cancer deaths among women around the world. Contemporary treatment for breast cancer is complex and involves highly specialized medical professionals collaborating in a series of information-intensive processes. This poses significant challenges to optimization of treatment plans for individual patients. W...

Refurbishing of used products is increasingly being recognized as a value recovery strategy in sustainable operations. Hence, manufacturers, retailers, as well as third‐party firms, engage in refurbishing. Manufacturers, to some extent, can deter other players from refurbishing through various means such as product design, intellectual property, re...

We are witnessing an interesting and unique phenomenon in enterprise information technology (IT) adoption and management in public-sector organizations: shared IT services. Instead of implementing separate IT services, governments come together to pool their IT resources into one single IT service. In this study, we develop a game-theoretic model t...

Explosive growth in the number of users on various social media platforms has transformed the way firms strategize their marketing activities. To take advantage of the vast size of social networks, firms have now turned their attention to influencer marketing wherein they employ independent influencers to promote their products on social media plat...

In order to deliver real-time feedback to support employee development and rapid innovation, many companies are replacing formal review-based performance management with systems that enable frequent and continuous employee evaluation. Real-time feedback applications enable supervisors and employees to give, seek, and receive competency-based feedba...

With human brands or individual celebrities in fields ranging from sports to politics increasingly using social media platforms to engage with their audience, it is important to understand the key drivers of online engagement. Using Twitter data from the political domain, we show that positive and negative-toned content receive higher engagement, a...

The fake review problem, an enduring challenge faced by E-commerce platforms, has worsened in recent years. In this paper, we investigate the platform's economic incentive to filter fake reviews. Using a game theoretical model, we analyze the sellers' manipulation behavior and the platform's optimal fake review control strategy. Our results show th...

The detection of environmental violators is critical to the long‐term adoption of sustainability in supply chain management. However, there exist manufacturing facilities that report false environmental monitoring data, thereby seriously hampering governments’ efforts to identify true offenders and to properly intervene. We integrate waste gas data...

We partnered with a leading U.S. academic medical center to empirically examine the impact of operational process changes designed to improve preoperative flow of patients through the perioperative environment. We focus on the implementation of centralized decision making and the introduction of an information technology (IT) enabled intraoperative...

We develop an easy‐to‐implement programmed method for generating new product ideas from existing products. In this method, whose core is a compatibility matrix, each pair of components or each pair of attributes used in a new design is already part of one or more existing products produced by the firm or its competitors. The method has theoretical...

The (relative) cost of the customer’s waiting time has long been used as a key parameter in queuing models, but it can be difficult to estimate. A recent study introduced a new queue characteristic, the value of the customer’s waiting time, which measures how an increase in the total customer waiting time reduces the servers’ idle time. This paper...

This study explores whether and how lower variations in clinical practice relate to hospital operational performance. This relation is critical to the overall search for pathways that will allow the healthcare industry to bend the cost curve, implying significant implications for practice and regulators. We define practice variation as all variatio...

Digital advertisements offer a full spectrum of behavioral customization for timing and content capabilities. The existing research in display advertising has predominantly concentrated on the content of advertising; however, our focus is on optimizing the timing of display advertising. In practice, users are constantly adjusting their engagement w...

Many advertising agents offer flexible advertising contracts wherein firms have the flexibility of adjusting their level of advertising during the advertising campaign, whereas some agents also offer committed contracts wherein firms do not have this flexibility. Based on our analysis, we would recommend that e-retailing firms choose the flexible c...

Initial deployment decisions are critical to humanitarian organizations as they pre‐position resources and prepare for predictable disasters, such as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires. Deploying too few resources results in unmet demand, bad publicity, and unhappy donors. However, deploying a large number of resources can also result in bad publici...

Can adopting multiple revenue streams secure long-term sustainability of HIEs? Healthcare information exchanges (HIEs) facilitate information sharing among participating healthcare practices. Despite HIEs’ pivotal role in improving healthcare delivery, many struggle to be financially sustainable in the long run. As a practical and implementable sol...

The (relative) cost of the customer’s waiting time has long been used as a key parameter in queueing models, but it can be difficult to estimate. Recently, Singhal, Singhal, and Kumar (2019) introduce a new queue characteristic, the value of the customer’s waiting time, which measures how an increase in the total customer waiting time reduces the s...

The sharing economy has developed rapidly in recent years using both business‐to‐customer (B2C) and customer‐to‐customer (C2C) models. This has exerted a profound impact on incumbent firms that follow a traditional sales model. Although the effects of B2C or C2C sharing in certain scenarios have been studied by prior literature, the effect of exter...

Retailers often provide lenient, consumer‐friendly return policies to reduce customers' perceived shopping risk and increase demand. As an unfortunate side effect for retailers, empirical findings demonstrate that lenient return policies lead some customers to abuse those return policies through opportunistic and even fraudulent behaviors. Customer...

We study a coin supply chain problem in the context of improving efficiency. While most consumer products are distributed in one direction, coins are recirculated and reused through the economy. The Federal Reserve System (FRS), the central banking system of the U.S., plays a crucial role in managing the U.S. Coin Supply Chain (CSC). It spends a si...

POM Special Issue CFP: Managing Autonomous and IoT-driven Intralogistics Operations

Recently, a growing number of online retailers have started meshing their pricing strategies with consumers' social networks. Specifically, they have started allowing consumers to invite peers from social media to request a discount for their purchases. We call this pricing strategy social pricing, under which consumers with higher social capital c...

Online reviews play a significant role in influencing decisions made by users in day-to-day life. The presence of reviewers who deliberately post fake reviews for financial or other gains, however, negatively impacts both users and businesses. Unfortunately, automatically detecting such reviewers is a challenging problem since fake reviews do not s...

The timing of vulnerability disclosures (by vulnerability discoverers) has significant implications for software producers and users. Immediate disclosure (before a patch becomes available) could result in exploits with subsequent harm to installed systems. Therefore, it is important to understand the determinants of this timing. In this study, we...

Healthcare portals are gaining in popularity, connecting doctors with potential consumers of healthcare services. As online search and transaction marketplaces, they bring both sides of the market onto the same platform. Managers or platform owners seek to create value by increasing the number of users on either side of demand and supply of service...

We utilize the event of store opening by a large apparel retailer and use customerlevel data to estimate the effect of store presence on the online purchase behavior of its existing customers. We find that the retailer's store openings resulted in an increase in online purchases fromsuch customers. Drawing on the theory of planned behavior and pros...

Owing to its multidisciplinary nature, the operations management (OM) and information systems (IS) interface distinguishes itself from the individually focused perspective of both fields. The number and depth of contributions in this department can help both disciplines advance to better address important theoretical and practical challenges of the...

We analyze a case where two competing firms, a personalizing firm that makes product recommendations and a non‐personalizing firm that does not recommend products, compete with each other and may participate in a data sharing alliance (in which the non‐personalizing firm shares its data with the personalizing firm). The customer is strategic as she...

We have developed a measure of the value of the customer's waiting time that is applicable to all queuing systems. Since the birth of the modern queuing theory over 100 years ago, this measure is the first addition to the list of the measures of performance of general queues that includes the servers’ utilization factor, the expected queue length,...

In the past decade, we have witnessed the growing importance of management responses to online reviews on digital platforms. In this study, we examine the impact of online management responses on business performance and their spillover effect on nearby businesses. By adopting multiple causal identification strategies to address the issue of self-s...

We study a manufacturer's product preannouncement decision in a setting where there is uncertainty about when an innovative new product design will be finalized for production, and a key component supplier needs to reserve the capacity before the realization of the final product design. The marketing literature has shown that product preannouncemen...

We study a setting where the nature of the collaboration necessitates two partner firms working together, which is often the case in supply chain and information technology (IT) environments. We consider that both firms get ongoing value from the project and the effort levels of both parties are dynamic. In this setting, one of the partners (say, t...

Cloud services have grown rapidly in recent years as a new form of service, but there exists scant research on the competition and service offering strategies of cloud service providers. We study these strategic choices by considering a setting where an incumbent cloud service provider may offer two service classes (premium and standard) and an ent...

Opinion spammers exploit consumer trust by posting false or deceptive reviews that may have a negative impact on both consumers and businesses. These dishonest posts are difficult to detect because of complex interactions between several user characteristics, such as review velocity, volume, and variety. We propose a novel hierarchical supervised-l...

Explosive growth in the number of users on various social media platforms has transformed the way firms strategize their marketing activities. To take advantage of the vast size of social networks, firms have now turned their attention to influencer marketing wherein they employ independent influencers to promote their products on social media plat...

In this day, in the age of big data, consumers leave an easily traceable digital footprint whenever they visit a website online. Firms are interested in capturing the digital footprints of their consumers to understand and predict consumer behavior. In this paper, we study how big data analytics have been used in the domains of information systems,...

Customers often evaluate products at brick-and-mortar stores to identify their “best-fit” product but buy it for a lower price at a competing online retailer. This free-riding behavior by customers is referred to as “showrooming,” and we show that this is detrimental to the profits of the brick-and-mortar stores. We first analyze price matching as...

The performance of a retail store depends on its ability to attract customer traffic, match labor with incoming traffic, and convert the incoming traffic into sales. Retailers make significant investments in marketing activities (such as advertising) to bring customers into their stores and in-store labor to convert that traffic into sales. Thus, a...

The performance of prediction markets depends crucially on the quality of user contribution. A social-media-based prediction market can utilize aspects of social effects to improve users’ contribution quality. In this study, we examine the causal effect of social audience size and online endorsement on prediction market participants’ prediction acc...

Losses due to Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections among injection drug users are substantial. Among HIV prevention programmes targeting injection drug users (IDUs), needle and syringe programmes are relatively easy to administrate and are cost-effective. We study the problem of optimally allocating prevention effort over a finite time hor...

This study provides an approach to manage an ongoing Internet ad campaign that substantially improves the number of clicks and the revenue earned from clicks. The problem we study is faced by an Internet advertising firm (Chitika) that operates in the Boston area. Chitika contracts with publishers to place relevant advertisements (ads) over a speci...

We study operational and managerial problems arising in the context of security monitoring where sessions, rather than raw individual events, are monitored to prevent attacks. The objective of the monitoring problem is to maximize the benefit of monitoring minus the monitoring cost. The key trade-off in our model is that as more sessions are monito...

In this chapter, we present future trends in web and mobile advertising, and associated challenges.

Many web sites (e.g., Hotmail, Yahoo, Google) provide free services to the users while generating revenues from advertising. Advertising revenue is, therefore, critical for these sites. This in turn raises the question, how should ads at a web site be scheduled in a planning horizon to maximize revenue. Consider a set of ads competing to be placed...

In this chapter, we analyze a problem faced by an Internet advertising firm (Chitika) that operates in the Boston area. Chitika contracts with publishers to place relevant ads over a specified period on publisher websites. Ad revenue accrues to the firm and the publisher only if a visitor clicks on an ad (i.e., we are considering the CPC model). Th...

The method to determine the price of web advertising is one of the most striking innovations. In the early phases, most of the web advertisements were sold through traditional exposure-based pricing models, such as the flat fee model or the cost per impression model. However, over time, some other models also emerged in practice where the pricing i...

As discussed in Chap. 2, the performance-based pricing has become the most prevalent web advertising pricing model. Hence, in this chapter, we consider a hybrid pricing model where the price advertisers pay is a function of (a) the number of exposures of the ad, and (b) the number of clicks on the ad. The problem is to find an ad schedule to maximi...