Research Overview:
The PEAR team has honed an ambitious research agenda, the mission of which is to maximize the positive impact of the platform economy through integrated, comprehensive, transdisciplinary research that will document and explore changing dynamics, develop ethical new technologies and algorithms for optimizing design, operation, incentives, and security, and identify and compare regulatory and data sharing practices that include the real-world implementation of digital platforms.
PEAR research focuses on five transformative research areas cross-cutting the PEAR training tracks. We will be discussing each research area below:
Data:
Data collection and analysis are key to understanding the important characteristics and dynamics of any socio-technical ecosystem. We also need new ways to collect independent data from digital platforms to model and understand the impacts the platforms are creating on workers and citizens at large.
Sample research topics include:
–Addressing issues in data portability and privacy
–Analyzing the impact of the opacity of algorithmic systems used by platform economy platform
Behaviors:
Digital platform ecosystems consist of a diverse set of stakeholders including for-profit, not-for-profit, and government organizations as well as the individuals that both make up the consumer and worker pools as well as those that get affected by the externalities created by the platforms. The motives and behaviors of these stakeholders both impact and are impacted by the ecosystem.
Sample research topics include:
-Examining behaviors and motivations of both the people with resources and those in need of the resources through the deployment of innovative methods to facilitate the collection of relevant data
-Modeling and validating these behaviors so that they can be considered in the design of digital platforms, policy, and public programs
Design and Operations:
PEAR’s goal is to comprehensively optimize the digital platform economy ecosystem without leaving any constituent groups behind. Hence, we study how the technical system, which consists of data-driven technologies to connect stakeholders in the marketplace, should best be designed and operated to interact with these behaviors and motivations to achieve optimal outcomes for both the users and society as a whole.
Sample research topics include:
-Developing design approaches that recognize that public agencies and private providers can cooperate to improve levels of service and be sustainable
-Understanding the importance and role of clearinghouses that centralize the processing of requests, in a more systematic and optimal context
Regulation and Public Policy:
Identify negative and positive externalities emerging in key platform industries and develop regulator structures and policies that incentivize behaviors, design, and operations on both the demand and supply side that ultimately lead to equitability among stakeholders and drive societal goals.
Sample research topics include:
-Analyzing the continuities and discontinuities in forms of collaboration that have occurred before, and since, the rise of the platform economy and analyzing these systems over an extended period to characterize the societal impacts in the evolving system
-Developing legislative solutions for the lack of portable employee benefits
Societal impact on the environment, energy, sustainability, healthcare, and transportation:
All PEAR faculty have active research in critical domain areas where the broader impact of the above research could be analyzed in context.
Sample research topics include:
-Analyzing the trade-offs in material use, energy use, and emissions
-Identifying the changes in system operations, which may partially or wholly offset environmental savings in a platform model
-Investigating higher-order environmental effects related to changes in land-use patterns and investments in distributed utility services