Pallab Sanyal, PhD

Pallab Sanyal, PhD

Associate Professor, School of Business

Faculty Directory

Research Focus

My research objective is to understand how people make decisions in complex economic institutions and how the decisions are influenced by the design of the institution. The advancements of information technology coupled with the proliferation of the internet have expanded the capabilities of economic mechanisms and have opened the way for sophisticated but increasingly complex trading mechanisms. Sophisticated markets such as health insurance exchanges often introduce complexities in the decision environment in terms of the cognitive demands put upon users. My research empirically examines a variety of advanced economic institutions to enrich our understanding of human decision-making in complex markets. The enumeration of the strategies pursued by market participants along with the analysis of financial implications of those strategies is expected to help practitioners design sustainable electronic markets.

Current Projects

■ What is the economic value of security features of software: the goal is to examine the economic value users associate with the security features relative to the application features of software.

■ How complexity influences the outcomes of economic mechanisms: the goal is to enumerate the sources of decision complexity in advanced economic mechanisms, and then study how complexity influences behavior and outcomes.

■ How feedback affects the dynamics of design contests: the goal is to investigate how different types of feedback affects the dynamics of online design competitions, especially the convergence and divergence of solutions.

Select Publications

■ Sanyal P., et al. (2018). Economic experiments in Information systems. MIS Quarterly, 42(2), 595-606.

■ Sanyal P. (2016). Characteristics and economic consequences of jump bids in combinatorial auctions. Information Systems Research, 27(2), 347-364.

■ Sanyal P. (2012). Competitive bidding for health insurance contracts: Lessons from the online HMO auctions. International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics, 12, 303-322.

■ Sanyal P., et al. (2011). Effect of information feedback on bidder behavior in continuous combinatorial auctions. Management Science, 58(4): 811-830.

 

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Contact

Phone: 703-993-1888

Email: psanyal@gmu.edu

Website: http://psanyal.net