NUS Computing Assistant Professor Qiao Dandan has won the INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) Gordon Davis Young Scholar Award. The award was named in honour of the University of Minnesota’s Professor Gordon Davis, one of the founding fathers of the information systems discipline. It rewards outstanding young scholars like Asst Prof Qiao who are poised to make intellectual contributions in the field of information systems.
Asst Prof Qiao’s research mainly focuses on digital platform design and social impact analysis of emerging technologies. One of her research perspectives looks at incentive design in prosocial contexts, such as the influence of incentives on online user behaviours in e-commerce.
To illustrate this, Asst Prof Qiao worked extensively on Amazon. Reviews left on a product listing can help prospective consumers make better purchase decisions. However, the scarcity of such reviews prompted the e-commerce giant to introduce incentives to solicit reviews from customers. To delve deeper into this issue, she studied the impact of such incentives-driven reviews, the mitigation of their adverse effects and the optimisation of their potential benefits. “These investigations not only understand the information consumption quality in the digital era but also provide guidelines for relevant platforms in incentive policy designs,” she said.
Besides e-commerce sites, Asst Prof Qiao also researched extensively on dark web economies. The dark web is a hidden and encrypted part of the internet landscape that is not indexed by search engines. Although it was initially intended to safeguard individual privacy, it has become a thriving ground for illegal and illicit activities such as drug dealing, the sale of weapons, and the exchange of illicit transactions. Her research sheds light on the role of law enforcement in countering these online offences.
She expressed her gratitude for receiving the recognition, “I am deeply honoured to have been bestowed with this award. My heartfelt thanks go to the award committee and to every individual who has been an integral part of my scholarly voyage: my family, supervisors, colleagues, co-authors, my students and many other scholars in this area. The helpful support from DISA, SOC, and NUS has created a very nice research environment that was instrumental in this achievement. With the award came a mix of emotions: pride, appreciation, and a renewed commitment to my domain.”
Asst Prof Qiao received the award at the Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST 2023) which was held in Phoenix, Arizona, the United States from 14 to 15 October 2023
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