About

Mustafa Akan is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the Tepper School of Business. His role involves teaching and research in the field of operations management, with a focus on how artificial intelligence and machine learning connect with business, management science, and organizational behavior. As part of the Tepper School’s faculty, he contributes to the school's strategic vision of leading at the intersection of business, technology, and analytics, supporting the school's initiatives in thought leadership and innovation.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Microeconomics
• Internal medicine
• Demography
• Economic growth
• Finance
• Medicine
• Operations management
• Economics
• Business

Selected publications

• Naor Revisited: Two-Sided Queues with Strategic Agents

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Delay Information Sharing in Two-Sided Queues

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Evaluation of Medical School Students in Terms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Emotional Regulation Difficulties

  Gazi Medical Journal · 2025-01-09 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Ama: Dikkat Eksiklii Hiperaktivite Bozukluu (DEHB) belirtileri bireylerin eitim, yaam kalitesi, i ve sosyal yaamlarn etkilemektedir.Aratrmalar, DEHB'li yetikinlerin bozukluun temel belirtilerini gsterdikleri kadar sklkla duygu dzenleme gl yaadklarn ve bunun da sosyal yaamda nemli sorunlara yol atn gstermektedir.Bu almada, bir niversite hastanesinde renim gren tp rencilerinde

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Comparative Analysis of Psychiatric Symptoms in Parkinson’s Disease Between Tremor-Dominant and Non-Tremor-Dominant Phenotypes

  Neurology India · 2025-09-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  BACKGROUND: There is currently no study comparing psychiatric symptoms in Parkinson's patients with tremor-dominant (TD) and non-tremor-dominant (NTD) phenotypes. Our research hypothesis suggests that patients with the TD phenotype would have higher levels of anxiety compared to those with the NTD phenotype. OBJECTIVE: To test this hypothesis and fill the gap in the literature. METHODS: The study included 128 patients, 77 in the TD group and 51 in the NTD group. After their neurological evaluation, the same psychiatrist interviewed them, and the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) and sociodemographic data form were administered. RESULTS: The TD group had statistically significantly higher scores on the BSI total and anxiety scores (P < 0.001 for both analyses). Linear regression analysis revealed that being in the TD group was an independent risk factor for BSI total and anxiety scores (P < 0.001 for both analyses). CONCLUSIONS: The results of our study are noteworthy as they show higher psychiatric symptoms in the TD group, despite previous studies reporting worse prognosis in Parkinson's patients with NTD phenotypes. In addition, the presentation of psychiatric symptoms in Parkinson's disease appears to be linked to how the disease manifests clinically.

  PublisherDOI

• Comparison of substance users under judicial supervision with controls in terms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and emotion regulation difficulties

  Journal of Clinical Psychiatry · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Comparison of substance users under judicial supervision with controls in terms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and

  PublisherDOI

• Transplant health inequities research from an operations perspective

  Health Sciences Review · 2024-04-21 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Organ transplantation has been proven to be an effective treatment for end-stage kidney, heart, liver and lung diseases. Recognizing the effects of health inequalities related to transplantation is important for underserved populations. This scoping review aims to map the scope of the operational management literature on health inequalities corresponding to deceased donor organ transplantation and to highlight knowledge gaps for direct future research. The document also describes some open questions that we hope will continue to attract the attention of researchers interested in the operational aspects of organ transplantation.

  PublisherDOI

• An interesting complication of COVID-19: Partial avulsion of the auricle due to prolonged use of a face mask in a psychotic patient

  Journal of Clinical Psychiatry · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  An interesting complication of COVID-19: Partial avulsion of the auricle due to facemask use in a psychotic patient SUMMARY , which develops as a result of SARS-CoV-2 infection, was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization shortly after its discovery in Mainland China.Social distancing, hygiene and the use of personal protective equipment have been strongly recommended worldwide as COVID-19 spreads through droplets.In Turkey, a mandate was issued on September 8, 2020, requiring individuals to wear face masks in all areas other than their own residences and stating that those who do not comply with the mandate will be subject to various criminal sanctions.In various parts of the world, such practices have aimed to popularize the use of face masks, but detailed information about individuals with special conditions such as children, the elderly, psychiatric patients, and patients with neurodegenerative diseases has not been sufficiently included.We believe that people with psychiatric illness have a special place in this group due to the nature of mental illness.Perceptual impairments in patients with schizophrenia may lead to exaggerated application of recommended precautions.This has raised the issue of whether personal protective equipment may cause undesirable effects as a result of prolonged exposure in these individuals.In this case report, we present a partial auricle avulsion in a patient with schizophrenia who used his mask for a long time without removing it because he was afraid of mandatory face mask use.Our case is one of the few psychiatric cases in the literature in which auricular avulsion due to prolonged face mask use is seen.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Efficient Allocation of Load-Balancing and Differentiation Tasks in Tandem Queue Services

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Dynamic Exception Points for Fair Liver Allocation

  Service Science · 2024-06-10 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  There are disparities in access to livers based on transplant patients’ height, which disproportionately affects Hispanics, Asians, and women (across all ethnicities), because short patients can receive transplants from a smaller pool of available deceased donors for medical reasons. Reduced likelihood of transplantation leads to higher mortality rates and longer waiting times. We analyze fairness within the current U.S. liver allocation system where patients receive priority dynamically, based on their model for end-stage liver disease (MELD) scores, which reflect the severity of liver disease. We propose a simple adjustment, providing additional (exception) points based on height and MELD score, that can be easily implemented in practice, which materially reduces the disparity without sacrificing overall efficiency. We model the liver allocation system as a multiclass fluid model of overloaded queues with heterogeneous servers. We impose explicit equity constraints for all static patient classes, that is, height. We characterize the optimal solution under the objective of minimizing pretransplant mortality. The discretized version of the optimal policy is numerically solved using estimates from clinical data and a detailed simulation study demonstrates its effectiveness. The optimal policy, called the equity adjusted mortality risk policy, advocates ranking patients based on their short-term mortality risk adjusted for equity among height classes. Interpretation of the shadow prices of equity constraints in the optimal control problem as MELD exception points is novel in the transplant context since they can be seamlessly mapped into the existing system. Our simulations show that for women, the disparity can be almost completely eliminated. Hispanics and Asians greatly benefit from receiving these MELD exception points also. Our work provides a remedy to reduce the disparities in access to liver transplantation within the MELD-based allocation. Our approach can help the on-going analysis of the continuous distribution model for livers because it also considers aspects of candidate biology, notably height and body surface area. Funding: M. Akan was supported by the National Science Foundation [Grant CMMI-1334194] and the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) [Onetto Fellowship in Operations Management]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/serv.2023.0092 .

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Efficient allocation of load-balancing and differentiation tasks in tandem queue services

  Annals of Operations Research · 2024-08-12

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Design of Two-sided Markets In Dynamic and Uncertain Environments: Theoretical and Operational Issues

  NSF · $401k · 2014–2019

Frequent coauthors

• C. İbanoǧlu

  26 shared

• S. Evren

  Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy

  21 shared

• V. Keskín

  19 shared

• Z. Tunca

  Ege University

  17 shared

• İ̇brahim Eren

  17 shared

• Arman Teksin Tevfik

  12 shared

• Ayhan Algül

  11 shared

• Serdar Süleyman Can

  Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University

  11 shared

Education

• Managerial Economics and Strategy, Kellogg School of Management

  Northwestern University