Shivam Gupta, associate professor of supply chain management and analytics, joined the College of Business in 2018 and quickly established himself as a leading voice in his field. In 2024, he received the Emerging Scholar Research Award for his outstanding contributions with 10 articles in top academic journals.

His paper, “Agile Contracting: Managing Incentives Under Uncertain Needs,” published in Production and Operations Management in 2023, explores how to motivate third-party contractors in agile, dynamic environments. The research focuses on industries like software development, where a firm’s functional needs for the desired software are not static and may change over time to reflect its evolving business needs.

“We built a new mathematical model that captured key elements of this business environment, which allowed us to investigate the performance of two commonly used incentive contracts, fixed pricing and time-and-material pricing, and characterize conditions where one incentive contract performs better than the other,” he said. “The practical significance of our work is its greatest achievement. We proposed solutions that not only perform well in theory but are also easy for practitioners to implement.”

His co-author and Van Horne Family Endowed Chair Jennifer Ryan said, “I was able to observe first-hand his rare ability to combine a deep understanding of the practical problem with strong technical and analytical skills to derive meaningful results.”