Faculty & Research

Pai-Ling Yin is the Richard S. Leghorn (1939) Career Development Professor and an Assistant Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Managementat the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Her research focuses on how firms compete in the presence of network effects. She has studied how 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. Yin’s 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 also has written cases on technology and strategy on TiVo, PalmSource, Qualcomm, and SAP.

Prior to MIT Sloan, Yin was an assistant professor of strategy at Harvard Business School, where she taught the core strategy course and the strategy and technology elective course. She was the Resident Scholar for the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation in Washington, DC.

Yin holds a BA in French, a BS in economics, and a BS in math from Indiana University-Bloomington; an MSc in regulation from the London School of Economics and Political Science; and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. 

Pai-Ling Yin is the Richard S. Leghorn (1939) Career Development Professor and an Assistant Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Managementat the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Her research focuses on how firms compete in the presence of network effects. She has studied how demand-side drivers—in particular, uncertainty—and supply-side actions—such as control of distribution—affect industry evolution …