PARAM VIR SINGH

Param Vir Singh is Carnegie Bosch junior chair in Information Sciences and an Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the David A Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. He holds a PhD in Business Administration from the Foster School of Business, University of Washintgon, Seattle. He holds Masters degrees in Business Administration and Interdisciplinary Studies from University of Washington and Texas Tech University, respectively. He also holds a Bachelors degree in Chemical Engineering from Panjab University, Chandigarh, India.

param vir singh

Professor Singh is serving as the co-chair for the Conference of Information Systems and Technology, 2012, and the Workshop on Information Systems and Economics, 2012. He has served as the Information Systems Society cluster chair for the Informs Annual Meeting, 2011, as an Associate Editor for the International Conference on Information Systems 2011, as program committee member for Conference on Information Systems and Technology (2009, 2010, 2011) and ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce 2009, and as session chair for CORS-Informs 2009, and Informs Annual Meeting 2009.

Professor Singh's research interests entail understanding the underlying micro foundations of the online communities (both within and outside firms) formed around web 2.0/social media technologies. His research goals are to provide policy and design implications for these communities to help them achieve the goals for which they emerged or were created. To achieve these goals, he frequently collaborates with researchers across disciplines (such as Marketing and Organizational Behavior). His research has primarily focused on two closely related questions: (1) What factors affect the emergence and success of online communities? and (2) What kind of design and policy interventions can improve the value of web 2.0/social media technologies to firms that deploy them? To address design and policy questions, he builds dynamic structural models of individual behavior and conducts counterfactuals and policy simulations to analyze the impacts of interventions on measures of economic interest.

Professor Singh focuses on social media technologies where firms are innovatively using IT to solve tradition business problems. His studies on blogs have addressed important questions regarding governance of employee blogs by firms. His research shows that prohibiting employees from posting content that criticizes the firm or promotes the rivals, or posting non work related content or encourgaing lurkers to blog are suboptimal policies with negative consequences for organizations. His work on crowdsourcing ideation provides policies for firms to govern their crowdsourcing initiatives for getting highly valuable new product ideas from consumers. He is presently investigating how to optimally design crowdsourcing contests for innovation. His work on large scale networks explain the dynamics in network evolution as well as diffuson of innovations on networks. He also develops new econometric models and methods to deal efficiently with extremely large scale network data.