Yang Pan’s research interests include startup threats, emerging digital platforms, financial technology, and online user behavior. Her work investigates how digital technologies reshape competition and decision-making. One stream develops and validates a novel measure of New Entry Threat (NET) using textual similarity between high-tech incumbents’ and startups’ business descriptions. A key contribution is the first validated empirical measure of NET, which opens new avenues for studying startup disruption and demonstrates how incumbents strategically adjust innovation and other critical decisions. 

Another stream examines the impact of emerging digital platforms on markets and users: ride-sharing platforms’ competition with traditional transport highlights broad societal implications, while fintech innovations show how mobile trading and digital advisors reshape investor risk-taking, decision-making, and performance. Together, these studies form a coherent agenda on how technology transforms decisions at both individual and organizational levels.Dr. Pan’s research has been published in Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, and Production and Operations Management, and she has been invited to present at leading conferences such as ICIS, WISE, CIST, and AOM.

Before academia, Yang worked at IBM in Beijing for four years as an Advisory Technical Solution Consultant.

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