BALTIMORE, MD, May 13, 2025 – As communities across the United States continue to confront the devastating toll of mass shootings, new research reveals a staggering economic dimension to these tragedies. A study published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science finds that mass shootings cause an estimated $27 billion in annual lost revenue for U.S. retailers driven by sharp declines in foot traffic, reduced transaction volume and long-term store closures.
BALTIMORE, MD, May 13, 2025 – Researchers who took a close look at loosened concealed carry laws between 2010 and 2017 have found that “Shall Issue” regulations, which remove local authority discretion on the issuance of concealed carry gun permits, contribute to a significant increase in handgun purchases. At the same time, the researchers found that in states that adopted “Permitless Carry” policies, there was no noticeable change in gun purchases.
With sweeping new tariffs on Chinese-made products set to take effect this summer, Americans are being urged to prepare for price hikes on everyday goods. President Donald Trump's reinstated trade policies are expected to affect a wide swath of consumer imports, including electronics, furniture, appliances, and baby gear. Retail experts are advising shoppers to act before the tariffs hit and prices rise.
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INFORMS, the leading international association for operations research and analytics professionals, has awarded the U.S. Air Force Academy its 2017 UPS George D. Smith Prize for its operations research (O.R.) program, which prepares its graduates to become frontline O.R. practitioners as analysts in the Air Force.
INFORMS Fellow William Cook, of the University of Waterloo, calculated the best route for visiting 50,000 sites across America from the National Register of Historic Places. Traveling by foot via the shortest route, which stretches 100 times the length of the Appalachian Trail, it would take 50 years to visit each site.
With the number of natural disasters doubling globally since the 1980s, a team lead by INFORMS Fellow Anna Nagurney are researching a novel new way to improve disaster response efforts: game theory.
New research by INFORMS member Burak Kazaz, of the Martin J. Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, shows a wine distributor can significantly improve its profits by investing in wine futures, in addition to bottled wine. The study's numerical analysis demonstrates an approximate 21 percent profit improvement, a benefit that increases as the wine distributor's degree of risk aversion increases. This study will be published in the INFORMS journal of Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.
Aviation security expert and INFORMS Fellow Sheldon Jacobson provided insight on vulnerabilities at airport checkpoints, like the kind that resulted in 11 passengers passing through an unsupervised checkpoint at JFK airport in February, all of whom reached their flights without further screening.
“The most vulnerable time for any kind of check point is in a transition period,” said Jacobson, who continued that airport security is weakest early in the morning and during shift changes.
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