Operations and Management Professor John Birge Earns Kuhn Award

John Birge, Jerry W. and Carol Lee Levin Professor of Operations Management, won the 2008 Harold W. Kuhn Award for his paper, “Equity Valuation, Production, and Financial Planning: A Stochastic Programming Approach” coauthored with Xiaodong Xu. Presented annually since 2005, the award is given by the associate editors of Naval Research Logistics in recognition of an exceptional paper published in the past year. It is named for the author of the paper, “The Hungarian Method for the Assignment Problem,” selected three years ago as the very best printed by the journal since its founding in 1954.

The research “addresses an issue that has the potential to impact high-level corporate planning at many firms,” the citation said. “The paper takes a groundbreaking approach to the integration of operations and financial decisions faced by a firm. It presents an extension of a traditional multi-period production planning model, where in each period financing and default decisions have to be made in addition to the usual inventory ordering decision, and where uncertainty is explicitly incorporated in the form of a set of possible future scenarios. The objective is to maximize the expected discounted net cash flow to investors in each period.”

Birge will receive the award at the annual INFORMS meeting in Washington DC in October.