On Saturday, October 19, Driehaus College of Business
Dean Sulin Ba was awarded the 2024 INFORMS Information Systems Society Distinguished Fellow Award. It’s a top honor in the information systems field — one that recognizes not only impactful research but also exceptional mentorship.Jamie Merchant recently sat down with Dean Ba for a wide-ranging discussion about the award, the research that led to it, Ba’s perspective on trust and disinformation, and the potential impact of artificial intelligence platforms.
On the meaning of mentorship
Jamie Merchant (JM): What does this award mean to you?
Sulin Ba (SB): While this award is mainly for research contributions, it’s also for mentoring the next generation of young researchers. That is something I'm especially proud of. As we train younger researchers, mentorship is very important to keep in mind. I've always taken that attitude, not just in the research setting, but also in terms of how we facilitate our students' success at DePaul.
I certainly have benefited from previous generations of researchers. My PhD advisor has been a phenomenal mentor. He's had hundreds of former students, and he's been an exemplary mentor for them all throughout their career, including me. I try to continue in that tradition in how I think about mentorship today.
On trust and the risks of herd behavior in online communities
JM: One of the main themes of your early research is the potential of the internet as a forum for organizing businesses and human communication more generally. What drew you to that topic? How have your interests changed since?
SB: When I was a PhD student, the internet was just getting popular. My PhD advisor wanted his PhD students to all start looking at this thing called electronic commerce and, more broadly, the potential of the internet.
A big question at the time was whether people would have the trust necessary to conduct business and commerce on the internet. Trust has always been about meeting people — or at least communicating with them directly. But online, you don't meet people. You don't even know who's behind these transactions.
So, I started looking at the different types of trust, including what kinds of trust are necessary in this internet environment and what can build trust. One of my early papers was on online feedback forums, and how they build trust among strangers. These were basically the earlier version of online reviews. And today, online reviews are everywhere.
Now, several decades later, this is something we take for granted: tools that help people build enough trust to engage with totally anonymous strangers online. So that paper has been highly cited, because it was one of the earliest to start that line of research.
JM: It seems like it was highly predictive in identifying how social trust would be built in these new, online environments. What direction did that take you in later?
SB: My more recent work is about this type of online crowdsourcing called “crowd contests.” Companies do crowdsourcing, people do crowdsourcing – if you think of Wikipedia, it's a form of crowdsourcing. It’s many different people contributing to the knowledge base and/or solving a problem collectively.
Crowd contests turn this into a competition. The idea is there will be a crowd who can look at the problem from different angles and submit different algorithms. And if you’re running one of these contests, you want to come up with ways to stimulate participation and engagement.
One company came up with the idea of a public scoreboard, which was a way to gamify the experience. People tend to have a competitive streak. People take great pride in being leaders.
But when my co-authors and I looked at it, we noticed that the leaders on the scoreboard were oftentimes not the final contest winners. There was very little overlap. The scoreboard wasn’t serving its purpose, because people were doing what it takes to get on the board. It distracted them from designing the best possible product.
So, we started analyzing this from an information system design point of view. What kind of information do you present? How do you choose what kind of information to present to achieve the best possible outcome? Sometimes, the information and incentives you use for engagement can backfire. The type of information we choose really matters.
On the promise and perils of the internet as an information system
JM: Back in the early days of the internet, there was a lot of confidence that — by sharing information and allowing more users with a variety of viewpoints to engage and participate — we were going to have that wisdom of the crowd effect. If all the information in the world is at everyone’s fingertips, then everyone can be fully informed, and all of the different perspectives coming together should result in a positive outcome for our society.
In 2024, how accurate does that prediction seem to you? Has that early promise of the internet been borne out, in your view?
SB: In a sense it levels the playing field, because everyone can access the wealth of information on the internet. But in fact, it has become an overload of information. Right now, a really important issue for society is misinformation, disinformation. There's no quality control. There's no reality check. Everything is just there. I think this has very significant implications for society. And honestly, when I think about social media, I really think it's done a lot of damage to the social fiber. And that brings us back to the question of trust.
The reason the earlier mechanisms I studied worked was because there was a specific economic principle embedded in their design: they were based on incentives that pushed toward quality and transparency. But for many of the trends we see now, there's no incentive system. There's no structure in place to control it. And that is a huge risk.
On future research plans
JM: Lastly, I’d like to ask about the future. When you have time to take out of your busy schedule running the College of Business, what interests you?
SB: The one thing I was getting started on before I came to DePaul was exploring the ethical implications of AI technology. I was very interested in understanding whether those AI systems actually would free us up to think more creatively, or would they really set us back because we would all become more similar in our thinking and more homogenized over time.
Since then, the whole discourse has changed with the release of large language models such as ChatGPT. I think we still have so much work to do to fully understand where these technologies are taking us and how they’re changing us as a society.