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Leela Nageswaran
Assistant Professor of Operations Management

Education

  • BTech Indian Institute of Technology (2010)
  • MS (2014)
  • PhD (2018)

Expertise

operations management, service management operations

Positions Held

Associate, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Mumbai, India, June 2010 - May 2012

Selected Publications

“Be the Buyer – Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd in E-Commerce Assortment Planning”
Nageswaran, L., Kan, Y., & Ananthakrishnan, U., (forthcoming). Management Science.

“Anti-competitive Effects of a Dominant Retailer’s Guaranteed Profit Margin and Low-Price Contracts”
Nageswaran, L., Jain, A., & Gurnani, H., (forthcoming). Management Science.

“Offline Returns for Online Retailers via Partnership”
Nageswaran, L., Hwang, E., & Cho, S.-H., (2025). Management Science, Vol. 71(1), pp. 279–297.

“Implications of Vaccine Shopping during Pandemic”
Nageswaran, L., (2022). Production and Operations Management, Vol. 32(4), pp. 1133–1149.

“Value of Online-Offline Return Partnership to Offline Retailers”
Hwang, E., Nageswaran, L., & Cho, S.-H., (2021). Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Vol. 24(3), pp. 1630–1649.

“Queues with Redundancy: Is Waiting in Multiple Lines Fair?”
Nageswaran, L., & Scheller-Wolf, A., (2021). Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Vol. 24(4), pp. 1959–1976.

“Consumer Return Policies in Omnichannel Operations”
Nageswaran, L., Cho, S.-H., & Scheller-Wolf, A., (2019). Management Science, Vol. 66(12), pp. 5558–5575.

Honors and Awards

PhD Program Mentoring Award, Foster School of Business, University of Washington, 2024.

Management Science Distinguished Service Award, 2024.

Finalist, INFORMS Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) Paper Competition, 2023.

Poets & Quants Top 50 Best Undergraduate Business Professors, 2022.

Management Science Meritorious Service Award, 2022.

Dean's Excellence Award for Undergraduate Teaching, Foster School of Business, University of Washington, 2022.

William W. Cooper Doctoral Dissertation Award, Carnegie Mellon University, 2018.

Second place, IBM Service Science Best Student Paper Award, 2016.

William Larimer Mellon Fellowship, Carnegie Mellon University, 2012-2016.

Working Papers

Who Should Set Consumer Returns Policies in Online Marketplaces: Supplier or Platform? (with Narendra Agrawal)

Impact of COVID-19 on Omnichannel Retail: Drivers of Online Sales during Pandemic (with Elina Hwang and Soo-Haeng Cho)

Capacity Flexibility via On-Demand Warehousing (with Soraya Fatehi and Michael Wagner)

Horizontal Information Sharing in Omnichannel Operations: Impact of Information Errors (with Jizhou Lu, Jinpeng Xu, Jin Kyung Kwak, Nagesh Gavirneni)

The Role of Product Quality in Marketplaces (with Aditya Jain and Haresh Gurnani)

Leela Nageswaran

Academic Department

Information Systems & Operations Management

Current Research

retail operations, returns management, OM-marketing interface, service operations