Professor Anindya Ghose's Research on Electronic Markets Honored

Anindya Ghose, assistant professor of information, operations and management sciences, was nominated for the best overall conference paper and was awarded the best paper in the Web Based Information Systems track at the 2007 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), the most prestigious gathering of information systems academics and research-oriented practitioners in the world, for his paper, "Estimating Menu Costs in Electronic Markets." Co-authored with Professor B. Gu from the University of Texas, Austin and selected from a total of 60 Web Based Systems Track submissions and 674 conference submissions overall, the paper provides a methodology for inferring the price-adjustment costs faced by firms in online markets and quantifies these managerial costs. It finds that, contrary to conventional wisdom, managers incur substantial costs for price-adjustment in online markets. Compared to offline retailers, online retailers incur significantly higher menu costs per price change, but the costs account for a lower proportion of their total revenues. This finding can have significant implications for pricing strategies in the emerging digital economy.

In addition, a second paper authored by Professor Ghose was awarded the runner-up for the best published paper appearing in 2006 in Information Systems Research (ISR), the flagship journal of the Information System Society. This paper, "Internet Exchanges for Used Books: An Empirical Analysis of Product Cannibalization and Social Welfare," was based on Professor Ghose's doctoral dissertation at Carnegie Mellon University and was co-authored with M. Smith and R. Telang. His research showed that while used book sales cannibalized new book sales, the presence of these online used good markets significantly increase consumer surplus and the profitability of online retailers.

Professor Ghose's research focuses on combining theories and methods from the economics of information systems with those from computer science, marketing and other social sciences and applying them to the domain of the Internet economy. His current work seeks to analyze two related issues: (1) the economic consequences of the next-generation Internet on industries transformed by its technology infrastructure such as search engine advertising, Long Tail marketing and geography-based channel substitution, and (2) the economic value of user-generated content created through Web 2.0 tools in online reputation systems, word-of-mouth forums, blogs and online social networks.

The ICIS 2007 and ISR honors are a couple of several recent honors awarded to Professor Ghose. He received the NSF CAREER and Microsoft Virtual Earth Awards in 2007, a Microsoft Live Labs Award in 2006, an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGMIS Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2005, as well as several Networks, Electronic Commerce and Telecommunications (NET) Institute grants in recent years. His work has been widely covered by industry outlets such as The New York Times, published in top-tier journals such as Management Science, ISR and Statistical Science and awarded best-paper nominations at prior information systems conferences. Professor Ghose teaches the undergraduate core course in information systems and an elective on electronic commerce.