Yuan (Tanya) Tian is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at NYU Shanghai. Prior to joining NYU Shanghai, she obtained her Ph.D. from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and was a researcher in residence at the Northwestern Institute of Complex Systems (NICO).

Dr. Tian is interested in the way social structures affect actors’—whether organizations or individuals—behaviors and performance. To that end, she investigates (1) how structural cues such as the status positions in a market affect firm strategies as well as individual performance, and (2) the construction of common knowledge that amplifies such impacts by a growing multitude of stakeholders and external arbiters. Her theoretical inquiries have naturally led her to study several empirical settings including the labor market, academia and science, nascent and illegitimate organizations.

Dr. Tian’s research is also unified by the methodological approach that uses a combination of computational and econometric methods. Specifically, she collects large-scale data and employs quasi-experiment designs to describe and identify new patterns and mechanisms pertinent to her theoretical interests. In this way, she aims to bridge sociological perspectives and the availability of new data and methods to study strategy and organizational behavior.