Prof. Tal Avindav is a full professor and Department Chair - Department of Management, Bar-Ilan University. He holds a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering (Magna cum laude), an M.B.A. with a specialization in Technology Management (Summa cum laude), and a Ph.D. in Operations Management, all from Tel Aviv University. His research, which is primarily theoretical, focuses on supply chain management for both digital products (such as apps, music, movies, and video games) and inventory management of durable goods (such as food and perishable products). The emphasis of his research is on developing mathematical and probabilistic models (operations research) to understand real-world processes and improve organizational performance through optimization and game theory strategies.

In his professional experience, he served as a production engineer in the academic reserve program and taught project management courses to executives in public organizations. Academically, he has been a lecturer at universities since 2000, served on university committees and the Council for Higher Education, was the Head of the Research Area in the Department of Management from October 2014 to September 2023, and has been serving as the Head of the Department of Management since October 2023. His recent research has received two consecutive three-year grants from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF).

Research Areas

My research focuses on two domains within the field of operations management: (i) supply-chain management and (ii) inventory management. In the first domain, I have modeled the interactions between supply-chain members using different types of contract and I have studied a wide range of supply-chain member decisions, including operational (e.g., investing in quality, setting the cycle length), marketing (e.g., setting the price and the sales effort), and financial (e.g., offering loans and setting the interest rate) under the assumption that each member acts as a strategic player and wishes to maximize his/her expected utility (or some other criterion) at equilibrium by using a game-theoretic approach. In the second domain, I have studied problems involving a single decision maker who wishes to maximize his/her (expected) profit by controlling the order/production quantity, the cycle length, the price, or the sales effort, while considering demand dynamics (either deterministic or stochastic) and various accounting schemes of the inventory costs.