Aaron Cheng

Dr. Zhi (Aaron) Cheng is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the Department of Management at the London School of Economics. Dr. Cheng earned his PhD degree in Business Administration, with a concentration on Management Information Systems, from Temple University in the United States.

Dr. Cheng’s research lies in understanding the economics of digitization, with a focus on grand societal challenges and business dilemmas in customer-centric firms. His research examines whether, how, and why current and emerging digital innovations can effectively and efficiently tackle real-world problems in both public sectors (e.g., transportation, health, education) and private sectors (e.g. insurance, advertising, retailing). His methodological expertise lies in causal inference and big data analytics, including econometrics, randomized controlled experiment, and machine learning.

Dr. Cheng has given over 30 talks at top conferences and workshops in the area of Information Systems since 2015, such as ICIS, WISE, CIST, AOM, INFORMS, AMCIS, SCECR, CODE@MIT, and CHITA. He has a forthcoming paper at Information Systems Research (2019), and a commentary on Journal of Information Technology (2016). His research has received Best Paper Award in ICIS 2016 in the HCI Track, as well as numbers of honors at Temple University. His research has been supported by external grants from the US National Science Foundation and US Department of Education, as well as internal seed funding (over $10K) from Young Scholars Interdisciplinary Forum at Fox School of Business at Temple University.

Dr. Cheng has also been an active external researcher and data scientist for a number of companies, government agencies, and think tanks including, TalkingData (Beijing, China), Vivat Insurance (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), Hersha Hospitality Trust (Philadelphia, USA), and IBM (Beijing, China). He has also served as an external scientist for the National Health Development Research Center (Beijing, China).