Summary of Research Interests
- Technology Competition
and Strategy.
"Technology goods" are very prominent today, and include
information goods, online services, software, electronic
gadgets, the media and entertainment industry, and
alternative energy. I am fascinated by the distinctive
economic forces underlying such products (both supply side -
e.g., their unique cost structures, and demand side - e.g.,
the prominence of network effects as a source of value
creation) and the distinctive competitive effects that are
critical in markets for such goods. I am particularly
interested in the operations, marketing, and strategic
implications of these economic forces. Specific topics in my
recent publications include price discrimination techniques
for network goods, pricing strategies in telecommunications
and IT services, sponsored search in recommenders and search
engines, stockout compensation practices, performance-based
pricing for IT goods, product versioning, grid computing, and
information structures in contract design.
- Technology-enabled
Decision Analysis.
Information technology and mathematical models can play an
important role in improving the quality of decision-making,
especially when there are many alternatives, multiple
criteria and uncertainty. My research in the early 1990s was
in decision-support technologies, and focused on developing
principles, formal languages, and computer-based tools for
model-based decision making. A few years later, with the
advent of the Internet, my research direction turned to
"anytime, anywhere" decision support. With the DecisionNet
project,we aimed to create a computing infrastructure and
market which would enable suppliers and consumers of decision
models to interact. The idea was to leverage
“collective intelligence” to create a library of
models, and provide platform-level tools for model
registration, translation, discovery, and
execution.