Jacob Patrick Chestnut

Biography

Jacob P. Chestnut is a senior lecturer at the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration. He joined the Nolan School faculty in July 2018, receiving his PhD in technology and operations management from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Chestnut holds a BA (valedictorian) and MA (summa cum laude) in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Chesnut’s research falls broadly under the umbrella of socially sustainable operations. His work is informed by the observation that a firm who views social sustainability as an opportunity to innovate can sometimes “do well by doing good.” In such situations, the firm endogenously adopts a more social focus while improving profits or decreasing costs, creating a win-win situation for disparate stakeholders. In this way, social outcomes improve without external impetus (e.g., government intervention) or appealing to multiple conflicting objectives (e.g., non-monetary). Chestnut solves such problems using a variety of methodologies including mechanism design, stochastic dominance, experimental design, and empirical estimation. Recently, he has been investigating problems related to social sustainability in agricultural value chains, with a particular focus on coffee value chains. This work forms the basis of Chestnut’s popular course, The Business of Coffee: From Farm to Cup.

His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and was recognized as a best paper finalist by the College of Healthcare Operations Management of the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS). Chestnut also has work published in the European Journal of Combinatorics and under review at Management Science.

Education

PhD Ross School of Business, University Of Michigan, 2019
MA University Of California, Berkeley, 2009
BA University Of California, Berkeley, 2007

Research

• Chestnut, Jacob; Sapir, Jenya; Swartz, Ed. "Enumerative properties of triangulations of spherical bundles over S1"European Journal of Combinatorics. 29.3 (2008): 662-671

Awards

• Finalist Best Paper Competition, College of Healthcare Operations Management (2017) Production and Operations Management Society
• Leabo Award for Excellence in Teaching (2016) Ross School of Business