TaSi People
People
Technology and Society Initiative
Director
Michael Luca, PhD
Professor, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
Michael Luca is a professor and the director of the Technology and Society Initiative at the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School, and a faculty research fellow at the NBER. Professor Luca's research, teaching, and advisory work focuses on the design of online platforms, and on the ways in which data can inform managerial and policy decisions.
His research has been published in academic journals including the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Management Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Economic Review: Papers and Proceeding, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics.
He has also written about behavioral economics and online platforms for media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Wired, and Slate. His research has been written about in a variety of media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New Yorker, Atlantic, Economist, Washington Post, Financial Times, Guardian, Huffington Post, Harvard Business Review, Time, USA Today, Boston Globe, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Fortune, Mashable, GQ, Wired, and Vox.
Professor Luca has developed and taught materials for executive education and MBA courses on business analytics, technology, behavioral economics, and leadership.
Professor Luca's current and past advisory roles include Board Member of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), Academic Advisory Board Member of the Behavioural Insights Team, Advisory Board Member for the OECD Digital for SMEs Global Initiative, and Advisory Board Member for the CNBC Technology Executive Council.
Research Affiliates
Jeff Fossett
Research Fellow, Technology and Society Initiative at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
Fossett is Research Lead at Plurality Institute, where he directs projects on technology and democracy, and a PhD candidate at Harvard Business School. Jeff’s research focuses on how digital technologies both shape and are shaped by markets, communities, and policy. Trained in economics and statistics, Jeff's research also blends perspectives from technology policy and science & technology studies (STS). Previously, he has been affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and worked as a data scientist at Airbnb. He holds a BA in Mathematics and Philosophy from Williams College, an AM in Statistics from Harvard University, and completed a secondary field in STS as part of his PhD program at Harvard. Outside of research, Jeff enjoys making art, sewing, and riding his bike.
Jonathan Sallet
Tech and Society Initiative Executive in Residence
Since 2020, Sallet has served as Special assistant attorney general with the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, where he is lead counsel for a coalition of states and territories in the on-going Google Search antitrust action. Sallet’s research and academic work focuses on competition issues and big tech platforms. He is a senior research fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-teaches the course “Big Tech and Competition”.
Sallet’s writings include The Dichotomous Treatment of Efficiencies in Horizontal Mergers: Too Much? Too Little? Getting it Right, (co-author with Professor Nancy Rose); Protecting the “Competitive Process” – The Evolution of Antitrust Enforcement in the United States, Competitive Edge; Multisided Platforms and Antitrust Enforcement and Protecting the “Competitive Process” – The Evolution of Antitrust Enforcement in the United States. His earlier governmental positions included service as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Litigation, Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice; General Counsel of the Federal Communications Commission; Member of the Governing Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States; and Assistant to the Secretary and Director, Office of Policy & Strategic Planning of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Research Assistants
Kristen Neale
Research Assistant
Neale is a third-year law student at Georgetown University Law Center. She is a research assistant focusing on the role of behavioral economics in antitrust law and enforcement, with a particular concentration on the modern “big tech” cases that have transformed the legal landscape in recent years. During law school, she has worked as an intern for the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and has most recently worked as a summer associate in an antitrust group at a law firm in Washington, DC.
Mingyang Sun
Research Assistant, Technology and Society Initiative, and PhD student, Economics, Johns Hopkins University
Sun’s research focuses on digital markets, behavioral economics, and industrial organization, with current work on how employee beliefs shape workforce adaptation to artificial intelligence. He is also interested in using structural models to analyze how platform strategies affect innovation and competition in digital markets. Before joining Johns Hopkins as PhD student in Economics, he received his M.A. in Economics from the University of Chicago.
Faculty Affiliates
Ritu Agarwal, PhD
Wm. Polk Carey Distinguished Professor, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
Ritu Agarwal is the Wm. Polk Carey Distinguished Professor of Information Systems and Health at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, and the founding co-director of the Center for Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence (CDHAI). She is an expert in the strategic use of information technology, digital transformation of health care, health analytics, and artificial intelligence applications in health.
Professor Agarwal’s research seeks to apply advanced digital technologies to health care practice and delivery, and to unravel the underlying behavioral, psychological, and social processes that enable and constrain successful health care interventions. She has been a pioneer in research related to digital technologies and health among scholars in leading business schools, and has devoted her research efforts towards improving health care quality, promoting equity and access, and reducing costs. She has published over 100 articles in leading business and health care journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Management Science, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and Health Affairs.
Agarwal has testified before the National Committee on Health and Vital Statistics and the U.S. Department of Health on her research related to digital technologies and health. She is an appointed member of the Federal Advisory Council for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the NIH and has served on the NIH Working Group for Integration of Behavioral and Social Science Research.
Filipe Campante, PhD
Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
Filipe Campante is a Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Distinguished Professor with appointments at Carey Business School and the School of Advanced International Studies. At SAIS, he serves as the vice dean for Faculty Affairs and Research. He is interested in political economy, development economics, and urban/regional issues. His research looks at what constrains politicians and policymakers beyond formal checks and balances: cultural norms, institutions, media, and political protest. In particular, it has focused on how these informal constraints are affected by the spatial distribution of people and economic activity, by access to information, by the evolution of cultural norms, and by the structure of the economy. He tries to answer these aggregate questions — what happens to countries or states or cities — with an applied microeconomic approach.
Andrew Ching, PhD
Professor, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
Andrew Ching, PhD (University of Minnesota), is a full professor of economics at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, and serves in a joint appointment with the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins University, he was a full professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He also had faculty appointment at Ohio State University, and visiting professor appointments at UCLA, Cornell University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, National University of Singapore, HKUST and Chinese University of Hong Kong (Distinguished Visiting Professor). In addition, he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. He has previously served as an associate editor for Management Science, guest associate editor for Marketing Science and Journal of Marketing Research, and a member of editorial boards for Marketing Science. He is currently serving as a member of editorial boards for Journal of Marketing Research and International Journal of Research in Marketing. His research focuses on developing new empirical structural models and estimation methods to understand the forward-looking, strategic, learning and bounded rational behavior of consumers and firms. He has applied these techniques to study the demand for prescription drugs, nursing homes, new technology adoption decisions, choice of payment methods, information spillover, late-mover advantages, video games demand, stockpiling, online support groups, and integrated marketing communication. His latest research focuses on modeling how consumers and firms adaptively learn in a dynamic world using AI and digital tools.
Itay Fainmesser, PhD
Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
Itay Fainmesser is a professor at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, and studies how social networks and social media affect and are affected by market activities and market rules. His current work studies the pricing of network goods, the role of intermediaries in markets, the shape and evolution of trust networks, the market for online influence, and user privacy in online platforms. His work was published in top economics and management journals such as The Review of Economic Studies, Management Science, and The Journal of Economic Theory.
Gordon Gao, PhD
Professor, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
Guodong (Gordon) Gao, PhD, MBA, is a professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and co-director of the Center for Digital Health and AI (CDHAI). Gao’s research interests include AI in health care, AI fairness, mHealth, and quality transparency. His research has been funded by NSF, NIH and AHRQ. Gao is dedicated to advancing AI for Health Equity education, especially for the under-resourced population and regions. He led several initiatives in the NIH-funded AIM-AHEAD program, such as the Professional Development Program, the Program for AI Readiness, and the Program for American Indian Higher Education Consortium. His work has been published at leading medical and business journals.
Wesley W. Koo, PhD
Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
Wesley W. Koo is an assistant professor in the Management & Organization area at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. His research examines the relations between business, technology, and society. It focuses on the governance of platform ecosystems and the effects of modern technology on business and society. He has studied rural entrepreneurs' ability to navigate changing algorithms and how platform governance affects the relations between domestic workers and their employers. His research has been published in top-tier academic journals and disseminated by leading media outlets. He serves on the editorial boards at Organization Science and Strategic Management Journal. Wesley received his PhD at Stanford University, where his research was supported by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, Stanford SEED, Accel Partners, Strategic Management Society, and Alibaba Group. Prior to Stanford, Wesley was a tech entrepreneur and received dual degrees in Environmental Engineering and Management from MIT.
Julia Levine, PhD
Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
Julia Levine is an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. Her research interests lie at the intersection of marketing and public policy. She studies how people's past choices impact their current choices, both in the case of brand loyalty and category-level consumption. She examines these dynamics in policy-relevant contexts, including demand for addictive goods and nutritional inequality.
Cameron Martel, PhD
Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.
Martel’s research investigates why people believe and share misinformation, what forces shape online social networks, and which content moderation interventions are effective for improving information quality online. He uses a variety of methods to examine these topics, including online survey experiments, social media field experiments, behavioral economic games, and computational social science analytics. He joined Carey in 2025 after receiving a PhD in Management Science from MIT Sloan School of Management.
Campante’s work has appeared in leading academic journals such as the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, among others. It has also received multiple mentions in outlets such as the New York Times, Science, NPR, Washington Post, The Economist, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, and Politico, among others. Campante is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and was assistant and associate professor of Public Policy at Harvard from 2007 until he joined Johns Hopkins University in 2018.
