Yi-Jen (Ian) Ho

Education

• Ph.D. Management - Information Systems, University of California, Irvine
• M.S. Management Information Systems, University of Arizona
• B.B.A. Information Management, National Central University, Taiwan

Biography

Yi-Jen (Ian) Ho’s research focuses on the impacts of information technologies, such as location-based services and artificial intelligence (AI), on commerce, fairness, and judicial systems. He applies game-theoretic modeling, econometrics, randomized experiments, and machine learning methods to obtain insights and identify causalities.

Ho has accumulated an impressive research record, publishing papers in premier business journals like Information Systems Research and Production and Operations Management. He has won best paper awards and earned nominations at major conferences, including INFORMS Information Systems and eBusiness Sections and WeB. He received the 2022 Gordon B. Davis Young Scholar Award and the 2017 Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award, which is presented by the INFORMS Information Systems Society.

He is serving as an associate editor at Management Information Systems, served as a special-issue senior editor at Production and Operations Management and as an editorial review board member at Information Systems Research, and has helped organize research sessions at leading conferences.

At Auburn, he serves as director of the Information Systems Management doctoral program and teaches Ph.D. seminar courses that strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills and their ability to use AI responsibly in their research.

Ho began his academic career at Penn State University, where he published several impactful studies on the effectiveness of geofencing and gamification in business advertising strategies. As a faculty member at Tulane University, Ho produced an insightful study on the role AI-generated recommendations play in judges’ final sentencing decisions. He also published studies on how AI can help faculty become more creative in producing novel and disruptive research, as well as on the implications of disclosing AI-generated content.

He and his research collaborators demonstrated that geofencing outperformed traditional advertising, and he proposed a more flexible and lucrative form of geofencing that benefits businesses and consumers.