Michael D. Smith

Professor Of Information Technology And Marketing, Heinz College And Tepper School Of Business

He received his Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering (summa cum laude) and his Masters of Science in Telecommunications Science from the University of Maryland, and received his Ph.D. in Management Science and Information Technology from the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

Professor Smith's research uses economic and statistical techniques to analyze firm and consumer behavior in online markets — specifically markets for digital information and digital media products. His research in this area has been published in leading Management Science, Economics, and Marketing journals and covered by professional journals including The Harvard Business Review and The Sloan Management Review and press outlets including The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Wired and Business Week.

Professor Smith has received several awards for his teaching and research including the National Science Foundation’s prestigious CAREER Research Award, the 2009 and 2004 Best Teacher Awards in Carnegie Mellon’s Masters of Information Systems Management program, the best published paper award runner-up for Information Systems Research in 2006, and best paper nominations at the International Conference on Information Systems and the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. He was also recently selected as one of the top 100 “emerging engineering leaders in the United States” by the National Academy of Engineering. Professor Smith currently serves as a Senior Editor at Information Systems Research, and has previously served as an Associate Editor at Management Science and Management Information Systems Quarterly.

Prior to receiving his Ph.D., Professor Smith worked extensively in the telecommunications and information systems industries, first with GTE in their laboratories, telecommunications, and satellite business units and subsequently with Booz Allen and Hamilton as a member of their telecommunications client service team. While with GTE, Professor Smith was awarded a patent for research applying fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence techniques to the design and operation of telecommunications networks.

Selected Publications

• Danaher, Brett, Michael D. Smith, Rahul Telang. 2017. “Copyright Enforcement in the Digital Age: Empirical Evidence and Conclusions.” Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery. 60(2)68-75.
• Danaher, Brett and Michael D. Smith, Digital Piracy, Film Quality, and Social Welfare, 24 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 923 (2017).
• Chen, Hailiang and Hu, Yu Jeffrey and Smith, Michael D., The Impact of Ebook Distribution on Print Sales: Analysis of a Natural Experiment (February 2016).
• Cho, Daegon and Smith, Michael D. and Telang, Rahul, An Empirical Analysis of Frequency and Location of Concerts in the Digital Age (April 17, 2017). Information Economics and Policy, Forthcoming.
• Godinho de Matos, Miguel, Pedro Ferriera, Michael D. Smith. 2017. The Effect of Subscription Video-On-Demand on Piracy: Evidence from a Household Level Randomized Experiment. Management Science, Articles in Advance, pp. primary article.
• Stephens-Davidowitz, S., Varian, H. & Smith, M.D. Quant Mark Econ (2017) 15: 1.