My name is Cagin (originally Çağın). It is pronounced approximately ‘CHA-uhn.’

I am an Assistant Professor of Operations and Information Systems at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. My research focuses on sequential decision problems under uncertainty and data-driven decision-making. I use stochastic modeling and techniques from optimization, applied probability, and statistics to address challenging operational problems involving complex uncertainties and tradeoffs. I develop practical and efficient algorithms, and derive provably strong guarantees for their performance. I am particularly interested in consumer search and, more broadly, applications related to sequential search.

Before joining the University of Utah, I received my PhD in Decision Sciences from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, where I was advised by Prof. David B. Brown.

Publications

• Data-Driven Sequential Search,
  with David B. Brown, 2025. Major Revision at Management Science.
  ● AI generated podcast
  ● Accepted to the NeurIPS 2025 ML×OR Workshop
  ● Media coverage: Duke Fuqua Insights and AACSB Research Roundup 

• Sequential Search with Acquisition Uncertainty,
  with David B. Brown, 2024. Management Science, 70(11):7712-7729.
  ★ Second Place, 2023 INFORMS MSOM Student Paper Award.

• Compound Poisson Disorder Problem with Uniformly Distributed Disorder Time,
  with Savas Dayanik and Semih O. Sezer, 2023. Bernoulli 29(3):2272-2294.