Rate My Professor Saunak Basu

Saunak Basu, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He earned his Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2023, specializing in Management Information Systems and Data Science. His dissertation, titled "Decision-making on online crowdsourced platforms: From investment to charity using a multi-method approach," was directed by Ramanath Subramanyam. The work examines drivers of decision-making on crowdsourced platforms, including initial coin offering (ICO) investments and charitable micro-donations. It explores how emotions from patients' images affect donation decisions, the influence of patient survival chances on donation success, artificial intelligence's impact on human experts' ICO evaluations, perceptions of AI ability and outcome likelihood on human decisions, and key drivers of ICO success based on prior research.

Basu's academic interests include big data, machine learning, sentiment analysis, blockchain, and predictive analytics, particularly human-AI hybrid decision-making on digital platforms such as crowdfunding and ICO markets. His key publications are "Human Decision Making in AI Augmented Systems: Evidence from the Initial Coin Offering Market" (2021, with A. Garimella, W. Han, A. Dennis; 11 citations), "Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Human Decision Making on ICO Platforms" (2019, with W. Han, A. Garimella; 6 citations), "Implied Volatility and Predictability of GARCH Models" (2017, with V. Rajvanshi, A. Santra; 3 citations), and his 2023 dissertation. He presented "Explainability in Human-AI Hybrid Decision-Making on Crowdfunding Platforms" at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in November 2025 and chaired the session "Gig Economy and Social Media Research: Precarity, Policy, and Platform Governance: Unintended Consequences." At UNLV, Basu holds Graduate Faculty status at the Chair level across all levels and serves as affiliated faculty for advancing research with generative AI. Previously, he was a Graduate Research Assistant at UIUC's Gies College of Business.