Karthik Ramachandran
Associate Professor of Operations Management | Scheller College of Business at Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA, UNITED STATES
Dr. Ramachandran’s areas of research include New Product Development, Operations Strategy and Behavioral Operations.
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Biography
Karthik Ramachandran is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the Scheller College of Business, at Georgia Tech. Dr. Ramachandran’s areas of research include New Product Development, Operations Strategy and Behavioral Operations. His research has been published in multiple journals including Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Production & Operations Management and IIE Transactions.
Dr. Ramachandran currently teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in New Product Development, Collaborative Innovation and Global Product Strategies at the Scheller College of Business.
He obtained his Ph.D. in Operations Management and M.S. in Operations Research from the University of Texas at Austin. He was also a Research Associate at the University of California, San Diego and received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (Chennai). Before joining the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech, he taught at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX.
Areas of Expertise (4)
Behavioral Operations
Entrepreneurship
New Product Design and Development
Operations Strategy
Selected Accomplishments (2)
Distinguished Service Award
2018 Management Science
Meritorious Service Award
2015 M&SOM
Education (3)
McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin: Ph.D., Supply Chain and Operations Management 2007
University of Texas at Austin: M.S., Operations Research 2002
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras: B.S., Mechanical Engineering 2000
Affiliations (2)
- Production and Operations Management : Senior Editor
- Decision Sciences : Associate Editor
Links (4)
Selected Articles (3)
Multidimensional Decision Making in Operations: An Experimental Investigation of Joint Pricing and Quantity Decisions
Management Science
Karthik Ramachandran, Necati Tereyagoglu and Yusen Xia
2018 Firms in several industries, such as medicine, apparel, and publishing, must jointly determine the price and production quantity of their products well in advance of the selling season. Normative prescriptions to solve this problem have generally ignored behavioral aspects of decision making while behavioral research has paid limited attention to interdependent, multidimensional decisions. We experimentally examine subjects’ performance when they jointly determine price and quantities. We find that subjects systematically deviate from the theoretically optimal price and quantity levels. Contrary to expectation, decomposing the price and quantity decisions does not improve subjects’ decisions. In a series of follow-up experiments, we isolate the effects of (a) interdependence between decisions and (b) demand uncertainty. We show that decisions improve by making subjects more aware of interdependence and by reducing the uncertainty. However, reducing complexity through partial automation of the interdependent dimensions does not improve the decisions made by subjects. We also find that subjects anchor on cost for price decisions and on mean demand potential for quantity decisions, thereby explaining the consistent underpricing and overordering behavior across experiments.
Towards Building Multidisciplinary Knowledge on Management of Technology: An Introduction to the Special Issue
Production and Operations Management
Cheryl Gaimon, Manpreet Hora and Karthik Ramachandran
2016 Management of technology (MOT) concerns the processes by which innovations in technology are transformed to ultimately diffuse into the marketplace. As such, operations management contributes to the multidisciplinary realm of MOT through its study of a firm's resource capabilities. This special issue offers a broad and deep discussion on the interface between MOT and POM. The contributions of the MOT special issue are fourfold. First, we invited scholars from a variety of disciplines to write papers that highlight a broad perspective of emerging problems in MOT that can be addressed by POM researchers. Second, a set of contributed papers is included in the special issue spanning several themes at the intersection of POM and MOT. Third, much of this article is devoted to a deep discussion of an emerging theme that represents a fundamental challenge to the modern, knowledge‐intensive firm. Specifically, we explore how firms develop and leverage internal and external knowledge‐based resource capabilities to respond to the dynamic opportunities and threats created by innovations in technology. Lastly, we provide a comprehensive discussion of future research opportunities that relate to the challenges in managing the knowledge‐intensive firm.
Ordering Behavior Under Supply Risk:An Experimental Investigation
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Haresh Gurnani, Karthik Ramachandran, Saibal Ray, Yusen Xia
2013 As supply chains become increasingly complex and global in their scale, supplier selection and management in the face of disruption risk has become one of the most challenging tasks for modern managers. Several novel model-based approaches to managing such risks have been developed in the academic literature, but how behavioral tendencies may affect procurement decisions under such conditions has received relatively less attention. In this paper, we present results from a study where paid subjects were asked to place orders from two suppliers who differ in their costs and risks to satisfy a fixed amount of end-customer demand. We show that under such a scenario, it is theoretically optimal to sole source either from the more reliable (and more costly) supplier or from the more risky but cheaper supplier, depending on cost and risk parameters. Subjects in our experiment, however, show a systematic tendency to diversify their orders between the two sources. We document this diversification tendency in procurement decisions and its possible impact on profits under various cost and risk settings as well as comment on various ordering behavior observed during the experiments. We also establish that bounded rationality of subjects can provide a possible rationale for the above phenomenon.
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