Business PhD student Behzad Hezarkhani crossed the stage at convocation on Friday, Oct. 21, gaining his doctoral degree and the elite status of being the Faculty of Business Administration's first official PhD graduate.

“I am very proud to be the first PhD graduate of the Faculty of Business Administration,” said Dr. Hezarkhani. “It is a thrilling experience to go down a path that nobody has ever taken. I would have not been able to achieve this without the sustained support of the Faculty of Business Administration, in particular my eminent supervisor, Dr. Wieslaw Kubiak.”

 

“As the first graduate of the PhD program, Dr. Hezarkhani sets a high standard for both quality of research and timely thesis completion, for all the successive graduates from the program,” said Dr. Kubiak, University Research Professor. “The novel research results obtained in his PhD thesis and the prestigious Doctoral Thesis Scholarship awarded to Dr. Hazarkhani by the Canadian Purchasing Research Foundation illustrate that our students can successfully compete with students from well-established PhD programs across the country.”

 

Dr. Hezarkhani’s research is concentrated on supply chain management and is situated at the intersection of operations research and economics.

 

“The advances in information systems and communication technology, as well as the globalization of operations, have created new opportunities for co-operation and collaboration in and across supply chains,” he said. “If managed effectively, it can lower costs, increase profits, and result in higher customer service levels.”

 

Specifically, Dr. Hezarkhani’s PhD thesis studied transshipments in supply chains. This is the practice of sharing common resources among supply chain members in order to mitigate the risks of uncertain demands. Transshipment is being done in a variety of industries ranging from retail to upstream oil and gas, and even healthcare.

 

Although the optimization of transshipment variables is a classic topic in operations research, Dr. Hezarkhani’s thesis addressed this problem in a decentralized setting with self-interested decision-makers.

 

“When several decision-makers are involved in supplying a product to market, their incompatible incentives arising from their selfishness generally reduce the efficiency of the whole chain,” explained Dr. Hezarkhani. “However, it is possible to devise mechanisms that align the incentives of decision-makers. In my thesis, I have incorporated these issues in the analysis of transshipment problems.”

 

Dr. Hezarkhani's thesis introduces the first supply chain co-ordinating contract for transshipment problems with two agents. It also contains the first formal analysis of the costs involved in building and maintaining coalitions (co-operation costs), on the stability of transshipment alliances.

 

His research has already led to several prestigious publications in outlets such as the European Journal of Operational Research, Decision Making in Manufacturing and Services, International Journal of Management Practice, and the Wiley Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science.

 

Dr. Hezarkhani plans to continue his research on supply chain management and to also collaborate with industry to solve complex managerial and operational problems.

 

“There are many intriguing questions that motivate me to continue my research on supply chain management and decentralized cooperation,” he said. “The multi-lateral facet of modern supply chains demands for extensive research on collaboration and incentive alignment.”

 

Dr. Hezarkhani is looking forward to collaborating with industry to explore these issues, as he continues his academic research.

 

“In as much as I am concerned with the applications of my research in the real world, I am enthusiastic to work with business and industry to investigate the relevant areas of improvement and to discover useful ideas and techniques.”