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Leela Nageswaran
Assistant Professor of Operations Management

Education

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

Expertise

operations management, service management operations

Positions Held

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

Selected Publications

  1. The Role of Product Quality in Marketplaces"
    Nageswaran, L., Jain, A., Gurnani, H. (forthcoming). Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.
  2. “Be the Buyer – Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd in E-Commerce Assortment Planning”
    Nageswaran, L., Kan, Y., & Ananthakrishnan, U., (forthcoming). Management Science.
  3. “Anti-competitive Effects of a Dominant Retailer’s Guaranteed Profit Margin and Low-Price Contracts”
    Nageswaran, L., Jain, A., & Gurnani, H., (forthcoming). Management Science.
  4. “Offline Returns for Online Retailers via Partnership”
    Nageswaran, L., Hwang, E., & Cho, S.-H., (2025). Management Science, Vol. 71(1), pp. 279–297.
  5. “Implications of Vaccine Shopping during Pandemic”
    Nageswaran, L., (2022). Production and Operations Management, Vol. 32(4), pp. 1133–1149.
  6. “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.
  7. “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.
  8. “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

  • Management Science Distinguished Service Award, 2025
  • 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

  1. More Than the Mean: Consumer Preferences in Selecting Service Outlets (with Masha Shunko, Siddharth Singh)
  2. Social Divide in COVID-19 Vaccination Coverage: The Role of Supply and Allocation (with Xi Zheng, Yu Kan)
  3. Who Should Set Consumer Returns Policies in Online Marketplaces: Supplier or Platform? (with Narendra Agrawal)
  4. Impact of COVID-19 on Omnichannel Retail: Drivers of Online Sales during Pandemic (with Elina Hwang and Soo-Haeng Cho)
  5. Capacity Flexibility via On-Demand Warehousing (with Soraya Fatehi and Michael Wagner)
  6. Horizontal Information Sharing in Omnichannel Operations: Impact of Information Errors (with Jizhou Lu, Jinpeng Xu, Jin Kyung Kwak, Nagesh Gavirneni)
Leela Nageswaran

Academic Department

Information Systems & Operations Management

Academic Service

Associate Editor at Decision Sciences Journal (2026-present)
Editorial Review Board member at Production and Operations Management (2023-present)
Editorial Review Board member at Management and Business Review (2024-present)

Current Research

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