Research

My intellectual passion and curiosity centers around problem-solving and analysis techniques, which I apply to understand, describe, predict, evaluate or optimize decisions and courses of action in business and markets, particularly around technology products and platforms. My academic career in three decades has cut across two broad themes. The first was centered on development and application of cutting-edge decision modeling technologies. My second, and current, focus is technology competition and strategy. Here is a list of my publications.

Technology Competition and Platform Strategy

Business competition and strategy in hi-tech industries is strongly influenced by distinctive economic forces affecting the supply (e.g., low variable costs; huge economies of scale in fixing defective products; product ecosystems rather than linear supply chains), demand (e.g., customers perceive product value based on through network effects and product complements), and markets (e.g., technology-enabled platform marketplaces).

This combination of economic forces leads to intriguing business models, as well as disti competitive strategies in revenue management, pricing, bundling, product design, product launch timing and quality, formation of standards, management of product complements and alliances, and innovative business models. My research examines these issues in the context of telecommunication products, media and entertainment goods, online services, software, electronic gadgets, and alternative energy technologies. Specific topics of my research publications include

  • pricing strategy: practical pricing, versioning, price discrimination

  • bundling and industry structure

  • search advertising

  • health care: mobile health platforms, productivity impact of technology, health data marketplace design

  • platforms: monetization and auctions, bundling, launch and selling strategies

  • competitive strategy

Business Analytics and Decision Technologies

My early academic work (during the 1980s-90s) focused on computer-based languages and systems to facilitate the use of data and mathematical models in business decision making (what we now call "business analytics"). My key contributions in this area include (a) development of new methods for model representation and interchange between multiple modeling paradigms and languages, and the development of languages that enabled automated generalized hypertext interfaces which connected various elements such as model equations, variables and results. In the mid-1990s, with my collaborator Prof. Ramayya Krishnan at CMU, we launched a project called DecisionNet, through which we evangelized use of the Internet and distributed computing technologies for doing business analytics work.

My current interests in research insights from data are primarily in health care analytics. I am interested in technology-based interventions that have the potential to positively transform health care, and to measure and understand the true impact of these technologies, for instance, the impact of EMR technologies on physician productivity. Ongoing projects involve (a) the impact of drug price transparency and decision support systems which incorporate contextualized price data, along with recommended alternatives and savings, into physician-patient interactions at the point of care, and (b) the adoption and impact of health information exchanges which enable multiple provider organizations to exchange necessary patient data at point of care.