Research

The Digital Society Initiative (DSI) acts as a research incubator for scholars and researchers interested in fostering better collaboration with the industry to address questions of strategic importance to the digital society through rigorous academic and applied research. Recognizing that the future societal prosperity will be defined by how we creatively use, deploy, and assimilate digital technologies across all the sectors of the economy and by how the cultural norms is shaped by this paradigm shift, we focus on a number of far-reaching research questions, such as:

• What are the impacts of digital technologies on consumers, businesses, and the society?
• How does one measure these impacts?
• How should digital technologies and systems be designed toward the common goal of the society to benefit the general public?
• What are the digital implications for business managers and government officials in devising strategies and policies?

  Learn more about our vision and who we are. Specifically, the topics that our research projects have addressed or are currently addressing include:

• Sharing economy
• Electronic health care
• Business process redesign
• Mobile app economy
• Social media in politics
• Information assurance
• Business-to-business (B2B) versus business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce
• Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing
• Open innovation
• Global labor market platforms
• Online reputation
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning in business
• Strategic value of digital technologies

Featured Research

W. P. Carey Research & Ideas

Rethinking R&D: Running contents to find solutions

The rise in “open innovation” contests has helped companies broaden their research and development while reducing their cost and risk of failure. Such contests easily reach large numbers of external problem solvers with a variety of backgrounds, potentially leading to faster, cheaper, and better solutions.

Political polarization: Does social media make it worse?

Social media provides numerous outlets for people to voice their opinions. Researchers from the W. P. Carey School of Business wondered whether the virtual cacophony is contributing to political polarization. In this study they found that posting activity on Twitter was not correlated with political polarization, but members of Congress who followed more extreme views did appear more polarized in their own opinions and votes.

Fighting software piracy: Different weapons for different markets

With improperly licensed software costing producers some $63 billion a year what can companies do to get paid for their products? W. P. Carey researchers found strong interplay between piracy controls, product extensions, and consumer willingness to pay — for software and piracy.

Press Mentions

• Changing the Phoenix economy one gig at a time (Phoenix Business Journal)
• Online job auctions are more successful when bids are open for all to see (LSE Business Review)
• ASU researchers: Uber helps cut down on Valley traffic (CBS 5 News)