I'm originally from a small rural city in Georgia named Calhoun Georgia and I grew up there. I went to college at the University of Georgia about two hours away and then I moved to Atlanta and I've been here ever since, first in consulting, then getting my PhD at Emory and now I'm faculty. So not really have lived in other places, pretty much lived in the Atlanta area my whole life. What I enjoy are many things, the question around sports, food, and movies. I have spent a lot of my time outside of work in sports mainly with my kids. I do a lot of youth sports coaching for baseball and basketball

My interest probably put around new things we can do electronically that we used to have more difficulty doing. So one example that spans about fifteen to twenty years now is on which I do a lot of research on is the automotive industry. For example, you can buy cars online much more readily than you could have before and going back is something you would not do at all.So I like to explore what the implications of that are. So what does that mean? What changes can we create? What can we do we couldn't do before? So for example in the car industry, as cars are bought online that has very interesting market-level effects. So, for example, it improves market efficiency in a dramatic way pre-online commerce, prices might be very dispersed across the country, 2012 Honda accord might cost twelve thousand dollars in Atlanta and only ten thousand dollars Dallas Texas. So, the implications of being able to buy cars online is that kind of inefficiency has dramatically decreased.So someone who's looking at the expensive car can go online and find that same car is available much more cheaply someplace else and simply shift their demands to that lower price market, which is better matching at buyers and sellers, We are able to balance supply-demand more efficiently across the market. So that's a market level impact of the new ability to do things online that we couldn't before.There's certainly a dark side that to, another project that I've been working on lately, is on online lending and we now have the ability to go on sites like Prosper Lending Club and apply for a loan and perhaps get the loans relatively easily, relative to what we might have been able to otherwise and the outcome we study there is the effect that has on bankruptcy rates, and our conclusion is that the availability of online lending leads to an increase in bankruptcy rates. It actually allows people to get overextended with their debt. The ease of doing this loan application online actually has the dark side, getting people caught in a debt trap where they take on more debt than they can service. So to summarize, probably put it like to look at research questions around, things we can do, we couldn't do because of information technology and effects it has on individuals society a market level outcomes.

So a lot of the work I've done in the automotive industry has its roots in when I was in the consulting industry. So before I got my PhD, I worked for nine years consultant and I was exposed to the automotive industry through one of my consulting clients. So I was able to work with them during my PhD days and then ever since, on the kinds of questions I described about what happens when more and more cars are bought and sold online. So the access came from my relationship with the company through consulting work and in the fit with research was a function of working through with my adviser at Emory initially and then with other people and academia and my own insights into what the state of the research is, as to which problems would be good for the academic environment? What's a good academic research question? Other things have come from collaboration so the one with online lending is a topic that I become incident through working with a doctoral student here at Georgia Tech. Han Chung Wang has a deep interest in this area and he and I've worked on that together. So one area from my own personal experience, another from collaboration with that with a co-author.