Over 50 researchers at MIT have contributed to Digital Business projects and participate directly in the Center.
Prof. Dan Ariely is
a "behavioral economist", examining how people make real
decisions and how such decisions deviate from rationality assumed
by the standard economic model. The central topics in Professor
Ariely's work are: 1) behavior in electronic markets 2) the effects
of various payment mechanisms 3) the formation of willingness to
pay for products and services 4) the effects of decision contexts
on choice and 5) changes in preferences over time. Professor Ariely
has a joint appointment in the Media Laboratory at MIT, where he
is heading the eRationality research group.
Prof. Cynthia Barnhart specializes in developing models, optimization
methods and decision support systems for large-scale transportation
problems. She is currently co-director of the Operations Research
Center.
Prof. Dimitris Bertsimas
studies the theory and practice of optimization, stochastic modeling
and control, and data mining. His current research includes robust
optimization, data mining in health care, revenue management, and
finance. He is currently co-director of the Operations Research
Center.
Prof. Gabriel Bitran addresses topics that include matching the
supply and demand in service systems, capacity planning, technology
selection, pricing of perishable and seasonal products, and understanding
consumer behavior in highly interactive services like the Internet.
Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson explores
how advances in information technology contribute to organizational
change, intangible assets, and business performance. He directs
the Center for Digital Business at MIT, a research initiative that
analyzes the business uses of the Internet and related technologies.
His projects include a study of how the Internet affects product
and service competition and an analysis of optimal pricing strategies
for digital information. In a related project, Brynjolfsson is assessing
how investments in computers and networks alter productivity, organizational
structure, and labor demand
Prof. Diane Burton
employment relations in entrepreneurial companies and human resource
management practices. Currently, she is conducting a study of Silicon
Valley start-ups, with an emphasis on sources and consequences of
different organizational systems, structures, and practices. In
ongoing research, she is studying entrepreneurial teams and executive
careers.
Prof. John Carroll focuses on industries that manage significant
hazards, such as nuclear power, petrochemicals, and health care.
Carroll has examined the relationships between leadership, management
philosophies, teamwork, mental models, safety culture, and human
performance improvement.
Prof.
Nazli Choucri works in international relations and international
political economy with a special focus on conflict, connectivity,
and the global environment. Her current research is on the power
of knowledge in the global economy, and the political and strategic
implications of e-development, e-business, and e-learning.
David Clark is one of the true founders of the architecture of
the Internet. Recent activities include extensions to the Internet
to support real-time traffic, explicit allocation of service, pricing
and related economic issues, and policy issues surrounding local
loop employment. New activities focus on the architecture of the
Internet in the post-PC era
Prof. Michael A. Cusumano
specializes in strategy, product development, and entrepreneurship
in the computer software industry, as well as automobiles and consumer
electronics. His most recent work is a cross industry, strategic
analysis of optimizing the mix of products and services in the firm.
Prof. Roberto Fernandez studies economic sociology, organizational
behavior, social stratification, race, and ethnic relations. Among
his current projects are networks and hiring and Internet-based
recruitment
Prof. Charles
Fine focuses on technology supply chains. He examines how to
assess the present and especially the future-profitability and strategic
leverage among the various sectors in the supply chain; how to design
the supply chain (i.e., determine the boundaries and identity of
the organization) based on strategic and logistical assessments;
and how to assemble the capability to realize the chosen organizational
boundaries and manage within and across those boundaries.
Prof. Shane Frederick
studies judgment and decision making, with a focus on intertemporal
choice, the heuristics used to simplify decisions, and consumer
regret. He is currently studying how to manipulate impatience levels
for delayed goods and how surface features of information displays
affect tradeoff rates between product attributes.
Prof. Jérémie
Gallien focuses on mathematical models for the control of physical
flows and economic interfaces in supply-chains. He has worked in
particular on outbound optimization for online retailers, dynamic
assortment and inventory management for fast-fashion retail store
networks, revenue management for make-to-order manufacturers, and
online auctions.
Steve Graves develops
and applies operations research models and methods to solve problems
in manufacturing and distribution systems and in service operations.
Currently, he is focusing on supply chain optimization, strategic
inventory positioning in a supply chain, and production and capacity
planning for various contexts.
Prof. Benjamin Grosof
studies information technologies for e-commerce applications and
the new generation web. He researches knowledge-based IT for e-commerce
applications; technologies, business applications, and strategies
for Semantic Web Services (SWS); and the convergence of Web Services
and Semantic Web.
Prof. John Hauser
examines the design and marketing of new products, voice-of-the-customer
methods, customer satisfaction incentives, market research methods,
new product forecasting models, competitive marketing strategy,
and metrics to manage product development. His latest research focuses
on virtual customer methods, automated marketing, and product development
metrics.
Prof. Rebecca
Henderson focuses on problems of strategy formulation, competition,
research management, and product development in high-technology
industries.
Prof. Dirk Jenter
is especially interested in the interaction between managers and
(possibly inefficient) capital markets. Recent research projects
have been concerned with managerial insider trading and corporate
capital structure decisions, employee stock option compensation,
and CEO turnover.
Dr. Mark Klein focuses
his research on coordination science, with the goal of developing
methods and tools that support more effective coordination in groups
with humans and/or computer-based agents.
Prof. Eric Klopfer focuses on science education, teacher training,
and educational technology. He helps teachers build and use computer
simulations for science education, and uses handheld and wearable
computers to engage learners in simulations. His efforts in virtual
reality as an efficient and effective training tool are being implemented
at several corporations.
Prof. Thomas
Kochan focuses on the need to update America's work and employment
policies, institutions, and practices to catch up with a changing
workforce and economy. His recent work calls attention to the challenges
facing working families in meeting their responsibilities at work
and at home and in their communities. Through empirical research,
he demonstrates that fundamental changes in the quality of employee
and labor-management relations are needed to address America's critical
problems in industries ranging from health care, airlines, and manufacturing.
Prof. SP Kothari
focuses on financial reporting and capital markets, explaining the
diversity in international accounting practices, use of employee
stock options for compensating executives and accounting for stock
options, evaluating investment performance, and corporate uses of
derivatives for hedging and speculation. In addition, Kothari is
an expert on economic policy issues in India.
Dr. Robert Laubacher looks
at how information technology is transforming business organizations
and how those changes reshape employment contracts. Recent projects
examine the workings of temporary project teams inside large organizations.
These studies focus on how information technology can reinforce
and augment existing social networks, both inside and across firms.
Dr. William
Lehr is an Internet infrastructure industry economist and consultant.
His fields of specialization and research include industrial organization,
political economy, and regulatory economics as applied to the information
technology industries. His research with the Communications Futures
Program focuses on emerging broadband and wireless technologies,
and their implications for industry structure, business and public
policy.
Fred Leonberger is a Senior Advisor at the MIT Center for Integrated
Photonic Systems, and works with a number of technology companies
and venture firms in the fiber optics and photonics industry. He
is currently working on a research project which is an OpEx model
for fiber to the home.
Prof. Don Lessard studies international corporate strategy and
finance with a special emphasis on risk and knowledge management.
His current research focuses on globalization strategies in network
industries and the linkage of strategy on risk management in major
projects.
Prof.
John D.C. Little is a pioneer in marketing science, Little has
done research on a broad set of modeling and decision support issues,
including models of individual choice behavior, adaptive control
of promotional spending, and marketing mix models for consumer packaged
goods.
Prof. Andrew Lo is a
widely recognized expert in financial engineering and computational
finance. He is the director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial
Engineering. His research interests include the empirical validation
and implementation of financial asset pricing models; the pricing
of options and other derivative securities; financial engineering
and risk management; trading technology and market microstructure;
statistics, econometrics, and stochastic processes; computer algorithms
and numerical methods; financial visualization; nonlinear models
of stock and bond returns; hedge-fund risk and return dynamics and
risk transparency; and, most recently, evolutionary and neurobiological
models of individual risk preferences and financial markets.
Prof. Stuart
Madnick is focused in two areas - integrating information systems
to provide organizations with a more global view of their operations,
and Interdependence of Security and the Extended Enterprise (I-SEE
SIG).
Prof. Thomas W. Malone
teaches classes on leadership and information technology, and his
research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take
advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology.
He is director of the new Center for Collective Intelligence.
Prof. David McAdams explores how buyers and sellers interact strategically
in a variety of settings including markets, auctions, and bargaining.
Recent projects include extending classic oligopoly theory to settings
in which firms compete in such dimensions as price, advertising,
and research; the development of the theory of "multi-unit
auctions" to shed light on Treasury bond auctions, IPOs, electricity
procurement, and other applications; and showing how a seller no
commitment power can still bargain successfully with several buyers.
Prof. Wanda Orlikowski
investigates the ongoing relationship between information technologies
and organizations with particular emphasis on structures, cultures,
work practices, and change. She has examined the use of groupware
technologies in organizations and the social and technological aspects
of working virtually. She is currently leading a multi-year National
Science Foundation project on the social and economic implications
of using Internet technologies within firms.
Prof. James Orlin
has developed improved solution methodologies for problems in airline
scheduling, railroad scheduling, logistics, network design, telecommunications,
inventory control, marketing, and computational biology. He is especially
interested in developing techniques that obtain high-quality solutions
in a short amount of computation time.
Prof. Nitin Patel brings significant insight to the practical applications
of operations research and statistical analysis for small samples
or rare events. Current areas of research include developing algorithms
for data mining.
Prof. Georgia Perakis
investigates the theory and practice of optimization and equilibrium
problems. She is particularly interested in how optimization models
can be applied to solve complex problems in transportation, pricing,
and revenue management. She also studies the mathematical structure
that lies behind optimization, as well as the equilibrium problems
in static and dynamic environments.
Prof.
Tomaso Poggio is a computational neuroscientist whose recent
work focuses on the processes by which the brain learns to recognize
and categorize visual objects.
Prof. Drazen Prelec interjects psychological reasoning into the
study of economic and consumer behavior. In one line of inquiry,
he suggests that the traditional economic notion that people make
choices by balancing the costs and benefits of alternative options
overlooks the influence of personal decision-making rules. In another,
he questions the economic assumption that people are invariably
impatient, and prefer to have good things sooner rather than later.
In other intriguing studies, he probes which items people prefer
to save for and which ones they buy on credit, as well as whether
people with credit cards spend more than they should.
John Quimby leads
the software development of the Process Handbook. His recent work
has been focused on attaching tools such as the Matrix of Change
and Customer Experience Lifecycle Mapping to the PH.
Prof. Rajeev
Ram focuses on physical optics and electronics, including the
development of novel components and systems for communications and
sensing, novel semiconductor lasers for advanced fiber optic communications,
and studies of fundamental interactions between electronic materials
and light.
James
Rice conducts research in supply chain management, with particular
focus on organizational aspects of how firms coordinate both internally
within the organization, and externally with customers and suppliers.
Prof. Thomas Roemer studies product development with an emphasis
on time to market, project coordination, and information sharing.
He is currently conducting studies on the rate of new product introduction
in high-tech industries, part commonality strategies, and cooperation
patterns between OEMs and aftermarket suppliers in the global automotive
industry.
Dr. Alexander Samarov studies trust and reliability in electronic
commerce using statistics, statistical learning, and data mining
techniques
Prof. Andreas Schulz
focuses his research on understanding the theoretical limits of
today's optimization methods in view of incomplete information,
non-coordinated decision-making, or limited computational power.
His industrial collaborations include projects in telecommunications
network design, vehicle routing, and scheduling.
Prof. Yossi Sheffi
is focused on applications of operations research and computer science
to transportation and logistics and on logistics management and
integrated supply chain processes.
Dr. Michael D. Siegel looks at the integration of heterogeneous
information systems, information technology, and financial services
with a particular interest in research on strategy, application,
and implementation for financial services, electronic commerce and
security.
Prof. Duncan Simester
investigates retail pricing and how customers form inferences about
competitive prices from common marketing cues such as sale signs,
price endings, installment billing offers, and credit card logos.
His current work explores the long-term costs of stockouts, the
long-term impact of promotion decisions, dynamic catalog mailing
decisions, and adaptive techniques for the optimal design of pricing
and product decisions. Other work investigates the allocation of
ownership in channel relationships, and the adaptive design of market
research instruments.
Prof. David Simchi-Levi focuses
on developing and implementing robust and efficient techniques for
logistics and manufacturing systems. He has published widely in
professional journals on both practical and theoretical aspects
of logistics and supply chain management.
Prof. Catherine
Tucker explores the micro-influences of technology adoption
by firms. The aim of her research is to guide firms to the best
marketing strategies to speed up adoption of their products. She
is particularly interested in empirical studies of the adoption
of interactive technologies, network effects, social networks, and
word-of-mouth. Her research has focused primarily on the sectors
of banking, electronic payments, and enterprise technology.
Prof. Glen Urban concentrates
on the fascinating area of trust-based marketing on the Internet.
How trust is built on a web site, how site design can maximize sales
and trust, and how a trust-based marketing system could provide
an alternative to the "push" type of marketing commonly
observed, are just a few of the facets that Urban explores. His
current research focuses on customer advocacy. His new Theory A
aligns the firm as a representative of the customers needs and leads
to transparency, unbiased advice, trusted advisors, and best products.
Prof. Eric Van den Steen
uses game theoretic tools to study strategy and organization design.
His work has focused on the role of managerial vision in firms,
on mechanisms that make managers overoptimistic and overconfident,
and on the sources and effects of organizational homogeneity.
Prof. Eric von Hippel
discovers and explores patterns in the sources of innovation and
develops new processes to improve the "fuzzy front end"
of the innovation process-the end where ideas for breakthrough new
products and services are developed.
Peter Weill
centers on the role, value, and governance of IT in enterprises,
including areas such as IT portfolios, IT infrastructure, IT risk
management and IT architecture. He is director of MIT Sloan's Center
for Information Systems Research (CISR).
Prof. Daniel Weitzner
directs the Technology and Society Domain of the World Wide Web
Consortium where he is responsible for development of technology
standards that enable the web to address social, legal, and public
policy concerns such as privacy, free speech, security, protection
of minors, authentication, intellectual property and identification.
Prof Roy
Welsch is an expert in applied statistical methodology in manufacturing,
ebusiness, and finance, Welsch develops statistical models relating
process inputs to product outputs in semiconductor, film, and paper
manufacturing. He also looks at hybrid process control, credit card
scoring models, data mining for the analysis of massive data sets,
robust methods and design, value-at-risk models, and optimization
for financial time series.
Prof. JoAnne Yates
examines communication and information as they shape and are shaped
by technologies and policies over time. Her research encompasses
both historical and contemporary organizations, with a focus on
changing communication and information technologies and the related
work practices. Her current historical work focuses on the life
insurance industry's adoption and use of information technology
in the twentieth century..
Prof. Ezra Zuckerman
studies how social structures of various kinds emerge and influence
behavior and key outcomes for individuals, teams, and organizations.
His current research projects include a study of industry peer networks,
exclusive groups of noncompeting peer firms from the same industry
that gather on a regular basis to learn from one another's experiences
and to motivate one another to achieve higher performance.
|