Title

A Conversation about Platforms

Time

1:40pm - 3:00pm

Location

1605 Tilia, Room 1103, West Village

Abstract

Platforms, or technology-enabled business marketplaces, are transforming the way we think about business. For 200 years, business had been about creating large scale in various aspects and connecting them in a linear fashion: raw materials, parts and components, resources of production and transformation, distribution, etc., and using this large-scale structure to efficiently create and supply something of value to the customer. Today’s platform technologies change this in a fundamental way: business and customer value is created by enabling others to create and provide value – and then performing necessary tasks (such as discovery, matching, fulfillment, financial payments, trust etc.) to make it is easy for this to happen. This new business model raises plenty of exciting research questions, some of which I have worked on and will present in this seminar.

Biographical Sketch

Professor Bhargava works on platform economics and business analytics. He is an expert in technology management and the information technology industry, and his work covers decision modeling and the economics of information goods, online services, software, electronic gadgets, the media and entertainment industry, and use of of IT in clinical health care. Bhargava’s research in technology management highlights distinctive economic forces that affect technology goods, on both the supply side (e.g., their unique cost structures) and the demand side (e.g., the prominence of network effects as a source of value creation), and how these forces shape specific elements of operations, pricing, marketing, and competitive strategy. His research on these topics appear in several academic journals and conferences (partial listings are available at Google Scholar, SSRN and issuu.com), and as articles, conversations and interviews in the general press.