Dr. Ravi Aron
Assistant Professor, The Wharton School

Ravi Aron is Assistant Professor of Operations and Information Management at the Wharton School. He is also a member of the Information Systems: Strategy and Economics (ISSE) group at the Wharton School.

Dr. Aron received a MBA (PGDIM) from the Indian Institute of Management (Bangalore) specializing in Finance and Marketing. He received his M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Information Systems from the Stern School of Business at New York University and joined the Wharton faculty in 1999.

His doctoral dissertation was awarded the Herman E. Cross award in 1999 and he has won teaching excellence awards at the Wharton School.

He worked with Citicorp Inc. in India as an IT manager and worked as a consultant in the Far East in Malaysia (KL) and Thailand ( Bangkok). He has consulted with several firms in New York including Deutsche Bank, ING Barings Inc., McKinsey & Co. and Paine Weber Inc. He also founded and managed a software development firm in India (Madras) in 1985-'87 which developed turn key applications for several institutional clients in India.

Dr. Aron's research focuses on the pricing of information rich services and inter-organizational information sharing in outsourcing relationships. His current research addresses the phenomenon of Strategic Outsourcing (a.k.a. Business Process Outsourcing) and the Pricing of BPO contracts. Dr. Aron is also interested in studying what metrics are best deployed to measure the quality and efficacy of execution of different kinds of outsourced processes. His recent research also focuses on risk: especially on quantification, measurement and containment techniques in strategic outsourcing relationships and the appropriate governance structure for cross-border outsourcing. Dr. Aron has also advised government and policy making bodies in Singapore, Mauritius and India and consults with firms in several countries in the domain of strategic outsourcing of services. He is running several research projects in Singapore, Mauritius, India and the US on the outsourcing of services and is doing a longitudinal, multi-year study of the impact of strategic outsourcing on firms and on labor markets.

Dr. Aron has published several articles in research journals on these topics and has presented his work at a number of conferences to both practitioners and researchers in academia. He has given talks on electronic markets and BPO practices in several countries including US, UK, India, Singapore, Chile, Thailand, Mauritius and Japan.