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I am Anand Jacob Abraham, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at IIT Kharagpur. I completed my BTech in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Calicut, my MTech in Industrial Engineering and Management from the National Institute of Technology Calicut, and my PhD in Management Studies from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. My research focuses on resource economics, cooperative game theory, and pricing problems in supply chain management. In 2022, I received the Indian Economics Association medal in recognition of the academic contributions of my PhD work. My research has been published in prestigious journals such as Mathematical Social Sciences and Economics Letters.

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Teaching

Courses taught at IIT Kharagpur

Courses taught at IIM Jammu

Courses taught at NIT Calicut

Research

River sharing and pollution

This research is concerned with understanding the behaviour of countries or states that share a river under a situation of conflict and cooperation. Many existing studies that are carried out in the area investigate the allocation of water in a pollution-free environment. We seek to understand how pollution would impact water allocation decisions and cooperative endeavours like bilateral water trade. We show that water trade becomes adversely affected by the presence of pollutants.

Associated publication:
Abraham, A., Ramachandran, P. (2019). Effect of Pollution on Transboundary River Water Trade. In: Morais, D., Carreras, A., de Almeida, A., Vetschera, R. (eds) Group Decision and Negotiation: Behavior, Models, and Support. GDN 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 351. Springer, Cham. . View

Bilateral river water markets and dams

In many shared rivers, agents (riparian states) build dams. Although dams have the typical purpose of meeting water demands during water-scarce situations, they have some unintended consequences if the agents are sharing water by means of free market interactions. Our study shows that such interactions, under certain conditions, can lead to upstream agents storing water exclusively for trading and thus introducing artificial scarcity. This behavior leads to a loss of social welfare. We illustrate the findings of this study using secondary data from the Cauvery River basin in Karnataka state.

Associated publication:
Abraham A., & Ramachandran P. (2021). The welfare implications of transboundary storage and dam ownership on river water trade. Mathematical Social Sciences, 109, 18–27. View

Flood cost sharing

In transboundary rivers, property rights and responsibilities are often contested. This is mainly due to the absence of supranational institutions and unique apportionment principles. Although the problem of sharing pollution costs fairly among riparian states is discussed by Ni and Wang (2007) in their paper in GEB as well as many follow up research articles, the issue of floods have not been taken up. In our study, we consider the problem of a linear river system in which agents release water into the river during some surplus period, and flood damages are realized as a result. The problem concerns how to divide these damages fairly among riparian states. We adopt an axiomatic approach and propose the Sequential Upstream Proportional Allocation (SUPA) rule as the unique solution that satisfies the axioms of efficiency, downstream independence, and proportionality. Also, the solution is identified in terms of appropriate cooperative game theoretic solution concepts.

Associated publication:
Abraham A., & Ramachandran P. (2020). A solution for the flood cost sharing problem. Economics Letters, 189, Article 109030. View

Water sharing in flood-prone environments

In the presence of stochastic water flows, water sharing agreements may lose stability. The loss of stability here refers to agents deviating from the terms of the contract during a period of extreme scarcity or floods. Using a dynamic repeated game approach, we investigate the conditions on transferable utility to ensure the stability of water sharing agreements framed in a flood-prone basin. In particular, we investigated agreements with fixed payments as the side-payment scheme and the SUPA method for allocating flood damages. We show that stable agreements (agreements that hold in spite of stochastic water flows) are possible if the discount factor is sufficiently high. Also, such agreements are weakly more unstable than agreements in non-flood-prone settings.

Associated publication:
Abraham, A., & Ramachandran, P. (2021). Stable Agreements with Fixed Payments on Transboundary Flood Prone Rivers. In: Morais, D.C., Fang, L., Horita, M. (eds) Contemporary Issues in Group Decision and Negotiation. GDN 2021. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 420. Springer, Cham. View

Availability forecasting

Freshwater flows are often stochastic and therefore difficult to estimate. However, such estimates are required to plan several economic activities. In a flood prone river, reliable flow estimates are very much needed. In this research, we focus on the problem of streamflow forecasting using Empirical Ensemble Mode decomposition in combination with several machine learning models and compare their performance through a case study on the Periyar river basin. Traditional time series models (ARIMA) were used as a benchmark in the study, and performance was studied for various DL models. The DL models applied to the original time series data provided robust predictions with good performance, such as low RMSE and high correlation values. However, the DL models’ performances are not enhanced through integration with time series decomposition and EEMD. Furthermore, the empirical results and the k-fold cross-validation-based test indicate that all the DL models show equivalent performances. Interestingly, the DL models show superior performance over Prophet.

Associated publication:
Maiti, R., Menon, B. G., & Abraham, A. (2024). Ensemble empirical mode decomposition based deep learning models for forecasting river flow time series. Expert Systems with Applications, 255, 124550. View

Dual channel supply chain

Dual-channel supply chains sell products through an online channel as well as a traditional retail outlet. This often leads to cannibalization, and a central issue in dual channel supply chain management happens to be *double marginalization*, which refers to the reduction of overall supply chain profits as a result of self-interest-driven price selection by the channels. Centralizing supply chain decisions is a method to mitigate the double marginalization problem. However, the performance of a dual channel supply chain differs vastly in the presence of competition and under different modes of competition (simultaneous pricing, leader-follower pricing, etc.). In our work, we look at how prices and profits are affected by the presence of competition and also how prices and profits vary depending on the structure of the competitive market. Additionally, we investigate a competitive setting in which one of the dual channel supply chains offer refund policy for products sold through that chain. The results reveal that the refund offering supply chain need not necessarily have a profitability advantage in all scenarios of competition. The supply chain enjoys this advantage only when it is in a leader position in a Stackelberg competition. In all other competitive modes, the relative performance of the supply chain is heavily dependent on the price sensitivity.

Associated publications:
Nair, R. B., Abijith, K. P., Abraham, A., Kumar, K. R., & Sridharan, R. (2022). Prices and profits in centralized dual-channel supply chains under competition. IFAC-PapersOnLine, 55(10), 2366-2371. View
Nair, R. B., Abraham, A., Kumar, K. R., & Sridharan, R. (2023). Optimal pricing decisions of centralized dual-channel supply chains in a duopoly: a study on the influence of competition structure. Sādhanā, 49(1), 1. View
Nair, R. B., Abraham, A., Kumar, K. R., & Sridharan, R. (2025). Profitability analysis of two rival dual channel supply chains following refund policy adoption. OPSEARCH, 1-32. View

Cybersecurity resource allocation

Using a Bayesian game-theoretic framework, we study the decision of allocating defense resources in a cybersecurity system. The technical challenge of this problem is constituted owing to the uncertainty in the type of attacker. The type of attacker is unknown to the decision maker, and this might lead to inefficient allocation of resources. We concern ourselves with how the defense resources can be efficiently allocated in environments with (1) no data leaks, and (2) potential data leaks which allow attackers to know the details of defense allocation.

Associated publications:
Bhosale, A., Roychowdhury, S., and Abraham, A. (2025). Cybersecurity Resource Allocation for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles Using Bayesian Games. Reliability Engineering & System Safety, Article no: 111470. View

Contact

Email: anandabraham[at]iem.iitkgp.ac.in

Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering,
IIT Kharagpur, India