Rahul Telang

Trustees Professor and Program Chair Carnegie Mellon University

  • Pittsburgh PA

Rahul Telang is interested in how information and communication technologies (ICTs) information impact consumers, business and policies.

Contact

Carnegie Mellon University

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Biography

Rahul Telang is broadly interested in how information and communication technologies (ICTs) and associated digitization of information impact consumers, business and policies. Recently, he has been working on issues around the future of work, value of users' skills and skill training. His examination of the digital media industry has focused on how digitization (and associated piracy) in copyrighted industries is affecting the incentives of content provider, distributors and users. His research is directed towards understanding and shaping an optimal copyright and intellectual property policy in the Digitization Era. He has worked in the space of economics of information security and privacy. His key interest is in understanding the incentives of various parties (users, firms and hackers), why markets fail, how to create a useful policy framework and how to measure the effectiveness of such policies. His work explored the controversy surrounding vulnerability disclosure, vulnerability markets and their role in generating optimal outcomes. He has been examining the role of data breach disclosure laws on identity thefts. He is also part of Cylab and Institute for Infrastructure Protection (I3P). He also worked on a large NSA funded project on examining home users’ security and privacy behavior.

Areas of Expertise

Digitization of Information
Intellectual Properity Policy
Market Failures
Privacy
Piracy
Vulnerability Markets
Vulnerability Disclosure

Media Appearances

Hollywood plunges into all-out war on the heels of pandemic and a streaming revolution

ABC News  online

2023-07-17

Rahul Telang, a Carnegie Mellon University professor and co-author of the book “Streaming, Sharing, Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment,” says an entire era of change was condensed into two years.

“What is happening right now was bound to happen. With streaming, the whole business got disrupted,” says Telang. “So naturally, they’re complaining, ‘We need our fair share.’ But how do you decide what’s a fair share? There has to be a transparency about where the money is coming from and where it’s going. Until this gets resolved, this issue will keep coming up.”

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Ransomware, a love story

Lenovo Late Night I.T.  online

2021-12-01

Ransomware attacks have reached record levels, and the breaches aren’t letting up. Two cybersecurity heavyweights talk threat intelligence, business continuity, crime as a service, and the unexpected upside of ransomware.

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Is the cookie web tracker dying?

TheNextWeb  online

2021-08-07

“When advertisements became popular, especially with Google and all these ad markets, then there was more momentum toward finding and tracking data because the advertising had to be personalized,” said Rahul Telang, a professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Social

Industry Expertise

Information Technology and Services
Media - Online
Security
Internet

Education

Carnegie Mellon University

Ph.D.

Industrial Administration (Information Systems)

2002

Carnegie Mellon University

M.S.

Industrial Administration (Information Systems)

1999

Indian Institute of Foreign Trade

M.B.A.

1997

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Articles

The consequences of rating inflation on platforms: Evidence from a quasi-experiment

Information Systems Research

2023

Informative online ratings enable digital platforms to reduce the search cost for buyers to find good sellers. However, rating inflation, a phenomenon in which average rating increases and rating variance across listings decreases, threatens the informativeness of ratings. We empirically identify the consequences of rating inflation by conducting a quasi-experiment with a digital platform that exogenously changed its rating display rule in a treated neighborhood, which resulted in rating inflation.

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Incentive misalignments in programmatic advertising: Evidence from a randomized field experiment

Management Science

2023

In programmatic advertising, firms outsource the bidding for ad impressions to ad platforms. Although firms are interested in targeting consumers that respond positively to advertising, ad platforms are usually rewarded for targeting consumers with high overall purchase probability. We develop a theoretical model that shows if consumers with high baseline purchase probability respond more positively to advertising, then firms and ad platforms agree on which consumers to target. If, conversely, consumers with low baseline purchase probability are the ones for which ads work best, then ad platforms target consumers that firms do not want to target—the incentives are misaligned.

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The impact of ride-hailing services on congestion: Evidence from indian cities

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management

2023

Problem definition: Early research has documented significant growth in ride-hailing services worldwide and allied benefits. However, growing evidence of their negative externalities is leading to significant policy scrutiny. Despite demonstrated socioeconomic benefits and consumer surplus worth billions of dollars, cities are choosing to curb these services in a bid to mitigate first order urban mobility problems. Existing studies on the congestion effects of ride-hailing are limited, report mixed evidence, and exclusively focus on the United States, where the supply consists primarily of part-time drivers.

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