ANANYA SEN
I am the Alfred Blumstein Career Development Associate Professor (without tenure) at Carnegie Mellon University (Heinz College). Before coming to Carnegie Mellon, I was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT Sloan School of Management. I received my PhD from the Toulouse School of Economics. My research focuses on topics of technology and society, manifesting in questions about platforms and digitization. My research is empirical and uses various methods, including field experiments, natural experiments within observational data, and online survey experiments. I am currently an Associate Editor at Management Science, MISQ Special Issue on the Institutional Press in the Digital Age, and Information Economics and Policy.
My research centers around two broad themes: (1) platforms in the changing digital landscape and (2) the impact of platforms and digitization in education markets. The primary theme analyzes the impact of digital technologies on firms, with a particular focus on media markets and society. I am especially interested in strategies adopted by platforms and users in the wake of the digital disruption over the past two decades. Linked to this primary theme, I explore a tertiary strand investigating the potential of digital personalization enabled by email messaging campaigns. This allows me to analyze the role of personalization in product adoption and in turn helps uncover motivations of innovative entrepreneurs. The second theme of my research deals with the intersection of platforms, digitization, and education, where I focus on the availability of information for children on various, often sensitive topics, such as recent book bans.
A key feature of my research is to analyze those questions and contexts where managerial and policy questions are two sides of the same coin. This allows me to focus on research that sheds light on the impact of digital technologies on firm profitability and broader impacts on society, often the subject of policy debates.