Management Science Strategic Innovation Prize 2004 for researchers in Wageningen,Leuven and Helsinki

The Association of European Operational Research Societies (EURO) has awarded the Management Science Strategic Innovation Prize 2004, of value 12,000, for Timo Kuosmanen (Wageningen University), Laurens Cherchye (Catholic University of Leuven), and Timo Sipilinen (Agrifood Research Finland). The prize was announced on July 7 in the annual conference of Euro in Rhodes, Greece.

The prize was awarded for Kuosmanen et al. on article The Law of One Price in Data Envelopment Analysis: Restricting Weight Flexibility across Firms, which will be published in EuropeanJournal of Operational Research. In their award winning research, Kuosmanen et al. develop a new method for the measurement and analysis of productive efficiency under incomplete information about input (e.g. capital and labour) and output prices (e.g. for products and services). The method combines theoretical results from Microeconomic theory to the mathematical programming techniques of Operational Research, building a direct relationship between efficiency indices of the individual firms and of the industry as a whole. Potential application areas of the method include efficiency improvements in the public sector as well as reduction of environmental pressures from the industry and agriculture, among others.

The prize is intended to reward outstanding contributions in theory or inpractice to a well-chosen scientific area encouraging innovative researchersand possibly entire research groups to focus their work on a domain of particularstrategic interest. This year the domain was specified as performance managementand benchmarking, which has become a key area of concern in the public andprivate sectors as a way of driving the strategic direction of organisations.In the public sector the advent of league tables have become pervasive withboth positive and negative effects on performance. A variety of contemporaryapproaches and techniques have been developed and applied by managementscientists and others to improve organisational performance.

Dr. Timo Kuosmanen (Ph.D., Econ) was born on 8 May 1974 in Joensuu, Finland.He holds a M.Sc. degree from the University of Joensuu (1996), and the Ph.Ddegree from Helsinki School of Economics (2001), Finland. After his Ph.D.,Kuosmanen was appointed as a visiting assistant professor at the Instituteof Mathematics, the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2002 he was appointedto the permanent assistant professor’s position in the EnvironmentalEconomics and Natural Resources Group of Wageningen University. In his research,Dr. Kuosmasen has focused on the quantitative methods of productivity andefficiency analysis. To date, he has published fifteen articles in prestigiousinternational journals, together with numerous working papers and other reports.

Dr. Laurens Cherchye (Ph.D., Econ) was born on 19 November 1974 in Ieper, Belgium. He holds a M.Sc. degree (1998) and a Ph.D degree from the Catholic University of Leuven (2001), Belgium. After his Ph.D., Cherchye was appointed as a postdoctoral research fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) and a guest professor of the Catholic University of Leuven. In his research, Dr. Cherchye has focused on the nonparametric methods of production and consumption analysis.

Mr Timo Sipilinen (Lis., Agr) was born on 9 May 1959 in Artjrvi, Finland. He holds M.Sc. and Licensiate degrees from the University of Helsinki, finland (1986 and 1992, respectively). In January 2003 he was appointed as senior research by MTT Economic Research unit of Agrifood Research, Finland. His latest research projects focus on productivity and efficiency analysis at the farm level.