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Biography
Matt Drake is an Associate Professor of Supply Chain Management in the Palumbo-Donahue School of Business at Duquesne University. He is the PwC Alumni Faculty Fellow in Supply Chain Management from 2022-2025. He was the editor-in-chief of Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education from 2016-2020 and currently is an area editor for case studies for INFORMS Transactions on Education. Professor Drake primarily teaches quantitatively-focused courses in the Supply Chain Management program, including graduate and undergraduate-level courses in Forecasting, Production Planning, and Inventory Management as well as Global Transportation and Logistics. Professor Drake also teaches the Foundations of Business Analytics course for the undergraduate co-major in Business Analytics as well as Prescriptive Analytics and Decision Making in the M.S. in Analytics and Information Management program. He was awarded the Duquesne School of Business Distinguished Research Award in 2008 and the Duquesne School of Business Outstanding Teaching Award in 2021.
Professor Drake has developed six teaching cases that have either won or have been finalists for teaching case awards through the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) and the Decision Sciences Institute (DSI). He had also edited two case books for Pearson / FT Press: The Applied Business Analytics Casebook (published in 2014) and Advances in Business, Operations and Product Analytics (2016). These cases have been integrated into the Supply Chain Management and Business Analytics curricula at Duquesne.
Professor Drake has numerous research interests, many of which consider the incentives faced by decentralized decision makers in supply chains and ethical issues in supply chain collaboration. His work has been published in leading journals including Naval Research Logistics, European Journal of Operational Research, Omega, International Journal of Production Economics, OR Spectrum, International Transactions in Operational Research, Business Horizons, Journal of Business Ethics, and Science and Engineering Ethics. He is also the author of the book, Global Supply Chain Management, published by Business Expert Press in 2012. Several of his teaching materials have been published in INFORMS Transactions on Education, Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, and Spreadsheets in Education.
Prior to joining the Palumbo-Donahue School of Business as a faculty member, he was a student in the school, graduating in 2002 with a B.S. in Business Administration with concentrations in Supply Chain Management and Finance. He had internship experience with Pitt Ohio Express and Penske Logistics during his time as a student at Duquesne. After graduation from Duquesne, Professor Drake entered the doctoral program in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He earned a M.S. in Industrial Engineering in 2005 and a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering with a concentration in Economic Decision Analysis in 2006. He joined the faculty at Duquesne immediately afterward.
Education
Ph.D., Industrial Engineering, Georgia Institute of TechnologyM.S., Industrial Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
B.S., Business Administration, Duquesne University
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My research interests focus on many aspects of managing the supply chain. I like to consider the incentives that each party (such as a manufacturer and a retailer) has in making decisions and how these incentives can be realigned to achieve the best performance possible for the entire supply chain. To that end, I build economic models of supply chain decision environments using method such as constrained optimization and game theory. These models allow me to analyze the incentives that each supply chain party faces in the scenario and to devise mechanisms that realign the incentives to improve the performance of the overall system.
I am also interested in specific aspects of supply chain management that focus on ethical decision making and international issues. These topics have become even more important in recent years as global supply chains have become more interconnected and interdependent; thus, they pose a great risk to their constituents if they break down for any reason.