Pai-Ling Yin

Assistant Professor of Strategy at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Pai-Ling Yin is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She graduated summa cum laude from Indiana University-Bloomington with a BA in French, a BS in economics, and a BS in math. She was the Resident Scholar for the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation in Washington, DC. She obtained an MSc at The London School of Economics and Political Science in regulation. Her PhD in economics is from Stanford University. She then became an Assistant Professor of Strategy at Harvard Business School, where she taught the core strategy course and the strategy and technology elective course. Pai-Ling's research focuses on how firms compete in the presence of network effects. She has studied the roles that demand side drivers (in particular, uncertainty) and supply side actions such as control of distribution affect industry evolution. Her demand side work includes a study of information aggregation and dispersion in eBay online auction markets for computers. Recent work examines how second-movers can tip markets characterized by network effects in their favor, with specific application to the browser wars and derivatives exchange competition. The use of survey data is a methodological theme underlying her work. She has also written cases on technology and strategy (TiVo, PalmSource, Qualcomm, SAP).