INFORMS Releases

CATONSVILLE, MD, October 18, 2017 – More than 5,600 operations research and analytics professionals and students from around the world will arrive in Houston later this week for the 2017 INFORMS Annual Meeting, doing their part to not only learn and network within their profession, but to help with Houston’s ongoing recovery from Hurricane Harvey. 

CATONSVILLE, MD, October 13, 2017 - INFORMS, the leading international association for operations research and analytics professionals, announced today that Ramayya Krishnan, Ph.D., Dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, has been elected as the 25th President of the INFORMS Board of Directors.

CATONSVILLE, MD, October 12, 2017 - INFORMS congratulates Richard H. Thaler, renowned behavioral economist and researcher, who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his outstanding contributions to the field of economics. Among the citations prominently featured by the Nobel Prize committee in Professor Thaler’s award was his seminal 1985 paper on his now famous theory of mental accounting, which was published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science.

CATONSVILLE, MD, October 10, 2017 – In the U.S. today, the majority of professional stock market traders are young males and new evidence suggests biology strongly influences their trading behavior. According to a new study in the INFORMS journal Management Science, this could be a significant contributor to fluctuations in the market, as high testosterone levels can cause these traders to overestimate future stock values and change their trading behavior, leading to dangerous prices bubbles and subsequent crashes.

CATONSVILLE, MD, October 9, 2017 - In 2008, New York City mandated all chain restaurants to post the calories of items on their menus. The intent was to induce consumers to choose healthier items in the restaurant. A forthcoming study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, a leading scholarly marketing publication, investigated whether the calorie posting on menus has broader spillovers by impacting consumer evaluations of the restaurant. The study finds that health mentions about the foods increased significantly in online reviews after the calorie posting regulation. The result suggests that calorie posting can not only shift consumers towards healthier alternatives when inside a restaurant, but can also have spillovers on other customers reading the reviews by potentially redirecting them towards healthier restaurants and food items.