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Benjamin Chiao

PhD Candidate, School of Information, University of Michigan

Research Statement : I am interested in the economics of information technology, and experimental methods. My specialties are open-content economics, and economic solutions to spam. More specifically, I have written papers on open source and communism, non-price coordination experiments and optimal liability rules in open-content production, standard-setting organizations, patent pools, and using uncensored communication channels to curbing spam. I have involved in the establishment of two new behavioral labs in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Business School, and Faculty of Arts and Sciences & Department of Economics at New York University. I continue to run experiments in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Currently, I belong to the Incentive-Centered Design and the Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions groups at the University of Michigan.

What's New

• My official website contains more updated materials: http://benjaminchiao.org
• CV Updated

Research

1. Improving Email Service with Markets

A. Competition, Spam, and Email Services

We are using incentive-based strategies, embedded in existing markets, to discourage spam sending, and encourage better email services.

• we pointed out that by lowering the economic and information costs of switching between email service providers, we can stimulate competition to improve user-desired services such as strong spam filters.
• we offered a microeconomic model of the market for bulk commercial advertising email (the dominant form of spam) to develop a simple, feasible improvement to the current email system: an uncensored communication channel. Such a channel could be an email folder or account, to which properly tagged commercial solicitations are routed.

Go to the project page.

Papers

• Benjamin Chiao and Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, 2005. "The Market for Spam Filters: Switching Costs and Competition". Presented at the Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions workshop at the University of Michigan on October 17, 2005, see Powerpoint presentation here.
• Benjamin Chiao and Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, 2006. "Using Uncensored Communication Channels to Divert Spam Traffic". Proceedings of the 34th Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy. Awarded the NET Institute Grant. Download paper. Here's an hypothetical uncensored channel:
• 

2. Open-Content Economics

The open source phenonmenon seems to turn many traditional analyses across disciplines up side down. From this special case, we are trying to understand a broader class of phenonmenon in technology sharing and massive global collaboration, which we call open-content. Our works so far include papers on open source, patent pools, standard setting organizations, and interface and modularity.

Go to the project page.

Papers

• Benjamin Chiao, "An Economic Theory of Free and Open Source Software: A Tour from Lighthouse to Chinese-Style Socialism", Proceedings of the International Conference on Open Source 2003. The latest version is a working paper at the MIT Free/Open Source Research Community.
• Benjamin Chiao, "An Experimental Study of Open Innovation using MASTERMIND", under revision for resubmission to Management Science. Presented at the Economic Science Association's November 2004 meeting at Tuscon, AZ, and 2006 meeting in Hong Kong. Screenshots and paper. Working paper at the MIT Free/Open Source Research Community.
• Benjamin Chiao, Josh Lerner (Harvard), and Jean Tirole (MIT/Toulouse). "The Rules of Standard Setting Organizations: An Empirical Study". Forthcoming in RAND Journal of Economics. (Earlier versions appeared in Harvard Negotiation, Organizations and Markets (NOM) Research Paper No 05-05. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No 11156.)
• Benjamin Chiao, "Torts in Open Innovation: Liability Indemnification through Patent Pools". Academy of Management--Open Source Software Research Development Workshop. May 2006. The ICD group can also access other updated versions here.
• Benjamin Chiao [with Yan Chen, Robert Kraut (CMU), John Riedl (Minnesota)] "The Social Organization and Modularity of Open Source Communities(Tentative Title)". In Progress.

Map

(outdated) This map weaves together my works so far in this area. For a larger one, please click on the map.

CV

• PDF

Contact Information

• Email: benjamin DOT chiao AT gmail.com
• Cell: +1 (646) 732 2215
• Fax: +1 (734) 764 2475
• eFax: + 1 (309) 210 7228 (if your fax is <= 19 pages and please notify me before using it)
• Office Address: School of Information North, 1075 Beal Avenue, University of Michigan, MI 48109-2112
• Home Address: 2222 Fuller Court, Apt 1213A, Ann Arbor, MI 48105
• Web: http://benjaminchiao.org

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