Jane Tan

Jane Tan is an Assistant Professor of Information Technology and Operations Management at SMU Cox School of Business. Her research concerns the interplay between technology, human behavior, and their societal impact. The first stream of her research is dedicated to unraveling the impact of technology on an individual’s prosocial behavior, such as charitable donations, volunteering, and social media engagement in societal movements. The second stream of research focuses on electronic commerce by addressing the business challenges faced by marketplaces and online sellers with technological solutions.

Jane collaborates with fellow researchers to explore a variety of disruptive technologies. They examine digital platform designs and promotional strategies that encourage giving on charity-based crowdfunding platforms that support individual causes and public goods. They use social network analysis to understand volunteer retention and engagement in a crowdsourcing platform. They investigate the impact of attention and appreciation on users’ voluntary provision of answers on a question-and-answer platform. They also examine the ramifications of live chatting tools on sellers of different reputation levels. Jane’s research also emphasizes the importance of social media in prompting and propagating prosocial behavior in social movements.

She and her co-authors leverage the fundraising event of Giving Tuesday to understand how users’ social media engagement is shaped by the participation of their social connections. In another study, she and her co-authors explore how to optimize the social media template for people to self-announce their prosocial acts. Recently, she branches out to investigate blockchain-based charitable giving by examining the impact of crypto rewards on donations to Ukraine. Jane’s research appears in journals such as Management Information Systems Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and Journal of Management Information Systems. Her work has also been published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems and the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Jane was the runner-up of the Nunamaker-Chen dissertation award from the information systems society, and her paper has been a runner-up for the best paper award in Informs e-business section. Jane holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington. She will teach MBA and MSBA courses related to social media and web analytics at the Cox School of Business. She integrates her research into classrooms to create a unique learning environment for students to understand the constraints and affordances of social media.