Benjamin Hak-Fung Chiao

Papers: Titles / Abstracts

Short Bios:

BENJAMIN CHIAO was born in Hong Kong with his root in Chaoyang, Shantou. He obtained his PhD from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and his BBA and MSc from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Economics and the Department of Management Science and Information Systems at the Peking University Guanghua School of Management. He is Director of Peking University Information Society Group and Research Fellow at the Guanghua School of Management Institute for Health Economics and Management. Starting Fall 2010, he will be Associate Professor at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Previously he was Visiting Scholar at HKUST and Research Scientist/Director of Operations at New York University, both in the new labs he helped establish. He is Founding Director of a non-profit organization called Sichuan Teachers. His general interests are applied microeconomics, law and economics of information systems and policies, and intellectual property. His specialties are censorship(e.g., the Great Firewall of China), anti-spam economic mechanisms (e.g., i. uncensored communication channels and ii. communication buffers [patent pending no. PCT/CN2009/071969]), and open-content/source. He is beginning to research on health information systems. His research has appeared in, for example, RAND Journal of Economics and China Economic Publishing House. His recent invited talks include those in: Academia Sinica, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia U., National Taiwan U., Peking U., Shanghai Jiaotong U., Singapore Management U., Tsinghua U., UC Irvine, U. of Michigan, U. of Toulouse, and U. of Washington. He teaches graduate level theoretical microeconomics, managerial microeconomics and empirical microeconomics, and undergraduate level law and economics of information systems and policies.

Research News:

(Aug 25, 2010) NetEase, the largest email service provider in China, has made available to its roughly 300 million user acccounts an anti-spam feature very similar to the open channel mechanism Jeffrey MacKie-Mason and I proposed in 2006. See the updated paper here.

(Jun 30, 2010) To present "Some Economics Issues of Internet Management in China" at the China Internet Research Conference in Beijing.

(June 22-24, 2010) To conduct a field study of health information systems in Wenchuan, Sichuan.

(Jun 25, 2010) To present "The Great Firewall of China" at the Southwest University of Economics and Finance in Chengdu, Sichuan.

(Apr 30, 2010) As a Co-PI, colleagues in the Peking University China Center for Pharmaeconomics & Outcome Research and I have obtained US$100,000 funds, through Cisco Guanghua's Institute for Leadership, on the evaluation of the effects of new IT infrastructure on medical care in the Sichuan Earthquake area.

(May 25, 2009) My doctoral student and I just filed a patent application (patent pending no. PCT/CN2009/071969) of our invention that aims to reduce spam. See working paper: Benjamin Chiao and Shi Guang (2009). “Voluntary Delay in Communication Buffers to Reduce Spam.” Download:

(Apr 1, 2009) This is the latest version of our open channel paper: "Using Uncensored Communication Channels to Divert Spam Traffic". Joint work with Jeffrey MacKie-Mason. It has been presented around the world in a dozen seminars. Awarded the NET Institute grant. NET Institute Working Paper No. 06-20. Download:

(May 25, 2008) This joint paper is now published in the RAND Journal of Economics, Winter 2007: Benjamin Chiao, Josh Lerner, and Jean Tirole, "The Rules of Standard Setting Organizations: An Empirical Study".