Rahul Telang

Rahul Telang is professor of Information systems and Management at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University and at the Tepper School of Business (Courtesy).

Professor Telang’s is broadly interested in how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and associated digitization of information impact consumers, business and policies. Within this thread, his interest lies in two major domains. First is Digital Media Industry with a particular focus 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 was the recipient of Sloan Foundation Industry Study fellowship and a number of Google Faculty awards. He is a co-director of a center IDEA (Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics). He has worked extensively with industry and policy makers on variety of issue surrounding digitization of Media. He also does extensive consulting on this topic and has a book coming out.

His second area of work is on 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. Recently, he has been examining the role of data breach disclosure laws on identity thefts. He was the recipient of NSF CAREER award for his work on economics of information security. He is also part of Cylab and Institute for Infrastructure Protection (I3P). Currently, he is working on a large NSA funded project on examining home users’ security and privacy behavior.

Some of his other work has explored the role of broadband in schools, ICTs in for form of EMR (Electronic Medical Records) in hospitals, and so on.

Dr. Telang has published extensively in many top management and policy journals like Management Science, Marketing Science, ISR, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Industrial Economics, Journal of Policy and Management, and NBER chapters. He held senior editor positions at ISR (Information Systems Research) and MIS Quarterly. He has organized many conferences and workshops and many of his papers have received top honors at journals and conferences. He has generated large external funding over the years for many of his projects.

Currently he is also the director of the PhD program at the Heinz College.