About

Hemant Bhargava is a distinguished professor and the Jerome and Elsie Suran Chair in Technology Management at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management. He serves as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and is the Director of the Center for Analytics and Technology in Society. His research expertise lies in technology management, management information systems, economics of information technology industry, pricing and product design decisions, and management decision technologies. Bhargava is an academic leader in economic modeling and analysis of technology-based business and markets, focusing on decision analytics and how the characteristics of technology goods influence operations, marketing, and competitive strategy, with implications for markets and policy. He has extensively examined issues across various industries including platform businesses, information and telecommunications, healthcare, media and entertainment, and electric vehicles. Bhargava has published in top journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, Marketing Science, and others. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the INFORMS Information Systems Society, serves as Department Editor for INFORMS’ flagship journal Management Science, and co-founded the annual Theory in Economics of Information Systems workshop. Recognized for his contributions, he has received numerous awards including the INFORMS Journal on Computing 'Test of Time' award, a Research Excellence Gift from Google, and the INFORMS Information Systems Society President's Service Award in 2023. He earned his Ph.D. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and a B.S. in Mathematics from Delhi University.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Marketing
• Business
• Computer Security
• Industrial organization
• Economics
• Data science
• Knowledge management
• World Wide Web
• Microeconomics
• Process management

Selected publications

• The Evaluator Age: Generative AI and the Future of Knowledge Work

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Strategic Value of Data Sharing in Interdependent Markets

  Management Science · 2025-06-17 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Large, generalist, technology firms—so-called “big-tech” firms—powerful in their primary market, routinely enter secondary markets consisting of specialist firms. Naturally, one might expect a specialist firm to be fiercely protective of its data as a way to maintain its market position in the secondary market. Counter to this intuition, we demonstrate that a specialist firm willingly shares its market data with an intruding generalist. We do so by developing a model of cross-market competition in which the data collected via consumer usage in one market can improve product quality in another. We show that a specialist firm shares its data to strategically create codependence between the two firms, thereby softening competition and transforming the generalist firm from a traditional competitor into a coopetitor. For the generalist intruder, data from the specialist firm substitute for its own investments in product quality in the secondary market. As such, the act of sharing data makes the generalist a stakeholder in the data collected by the specialist, and consequently in the specialist’s continued success. Moreover, although the firms benefit from data sharing, consumers can be worse off from weakened price competition and lower investments in innovation. Our results have managerial and policy implications, notably on account of backlash against data collection and the market power of big-tech firms. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, information systems. Funding: D. Ronayne is grateful for support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [CRC TRR 190; Project 280092119]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.04938 .

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Evaluator Age: Generative AI and the Future of Knowledge Work

  ScholarSpace (University of Hawaii at Manoa) · 2025-12-23

  articleSenior author

  Generative artificial intelligence is dramatically re-ordering knowledge work, propelling organizations from the Producer Age into what we term the Evaluator Age. In this emerging phase, human value lies not in generating content but in critically assessing, refining, and ethically stewarding machine outputs. We trace the progression from the Preserver Age—when humans safeguarded scarce knowledge—through the Producer Age of mass creation, to today’s evaluator imperative. Generative models now excel at first-draft production, shifting the strategic bottleneck to quality control, bias detection, and contextual fit—tasks uniquely served by professionals who blend deep domain expertise, AI literacy, and moral judgment. We argue that universities must redesign curricula accordingly, foregrounding evaluative competencies alongside technical fluency. By positioning graduates as skilled custodians of AI-generated insight, higher education can secure its relevance and ensure that organizations harness AI responsibly and effectively.

  Publisher

• Exploring Generative AI’s Impact on Research: Perspectives from Senior Scholars in Management Information Systems

  ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems · 2025-03-26 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This commentary reflects on insights from a panel discussion at the 2024 Annual MIS Academic Leadership Conference, where six senior MIS scholars discussed the impact of Generative AI on scholarly research and peer review. The discussion underscored the importance of responsible use, transparency, and ethical standards, as well as the irreplaceable role of human judgment in maintaining research integrity. This commentary explores the potential of Generative AI as a collaborative tool across various stages of the research lifecycle, highlighting the "human-in-the-loop" approach to harness AI's capabilities while preserving essential human insight. This commentary synthesizes the senior scholars’ perspectives on the responsible integration of Generative AI, emphasizing opportunities to enhance research efficiency and foster interdisciplinary collaboration, while advocating for policies that ensure AI supports—rather than substitutes—human intellectual contributions in academic research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Drug-cost Decision-support at Prescribing (DDP): Early Experiences and Research Directions

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• If Platforms Are Exploiting Producers, Is Platform Competition the Solution?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Capitalizing on the Moment: The Strategic Role of Information Disclosure in Online Crowdfunding

  Production and Operations Management · 2024-02-05 · 5 citations

  article1st author

  Online crowdfunding platforms have created new avenues for investors to finance existing businesses or new business ventures of project creators. Project creators who launch crowdfunding campaigns can provide progress updates to potential investors throughout the fundraising process, helping to alleviate potential investors’ uncertainty about the project’s success. However, limited attention has been given to the strategic decisions of project creators on when to provide campaign updates. In this study, we focus on the timing strategy of information disclosure and investigate the effectiveness of campaign updates at different timing and performance level. Using a dataset from a leading online crowdfunding platform, we find that updates are more effective at the earlier stage of a crowdfunding campaign in attracting investors, and they play a different role depending on the project’s fundraising performance. For underperforming campaigns, the effectiveness of updates is more salient at the early stage of the campaign, whereas we find no differential impact at the later stage. By employing text analyses on the project descriptions and updates, we also derive insights about how the content of updates impacts their effectiveness at different stages of the campaign. Finally, our results also show that the timing of updates is more important for less experienced project creators, whereas the content of updates is more important for experienced project creators. These results provide important insights for project creators to strategically manage their campaigns in online crowdfunding platforms.

  PublisherDOI

• Stepping Up Your Brand Game in the Platform Age: How to Build a Commoditization SHIELD

  NIM Marketing Intelligence Review · 2024-10-26

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Should We Deal with Malicious Customers’ Threats in Online Review? Perspectives of Retailers, Customers, and Platforms

  Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We show that existence of malicious customers will distort the retailer's overall rating and under certain conditions, complying to malicious customers' request can actually increase its profit. In addition, we examine the importance of information provided by the platform, including the actually product quality and customer preference. Counter-intuitively, we show that retailer may not always use the perfect information as compliance with malicious customers can obtain positive ratings from them. This work also generates important implications for both retailers and platforms when dealing with malicious reviews.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Strategic Value of Data Sharing in Interdependent Markets

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ramayya Krishnan

  23 shared

• Juan Feng

  University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

  14 shared

• Rudolf Müller

  12 shared

• Steven O. Kimbrough

  12 shared

• Daewon Sun

  University of Notre Dame

  11 shared

• Geoffrey Parker

  Dartmouth College

  8 shared

• Vidyanand Choudhary

  University of California, Irvine

  6 shared

• Manish Gangwar

  Indian School of Business

  6 shared

Awards & honors

• INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) President's Servic…
• Jerome J. and Elsie Suran Chair in Technology Management (20…
• Chief Data Officer Magazine Top 100 Academic Data Leaders (2…
• Distinguished Fellow Award by the INFORMS Information System…
• Best Paper Award, eBusiness Section of the Institute for Ope…