H. Tai Lam
Assistant Professor of Marketing
UCLA Anderson School of Management
H. Tai Lam is an assistant professor of marketing at UCLA Anderson School of Management, where he studies digital platforms, consumer search, generative AI and antitrust. He co-wrote a study showing that people who adopted ChatGPT and other chatbots eventually ran roughly a fifth to a third fewer searches on traditional search engines.
Studying the Power of Platforms
"Modern platforms have enormous capacity to influence consumer behavior," Lam says on his UCLA Anderson faculty page. "My research seeks to understand whether this influence benefits or harms consumers, and how it changes competition between platform owners and platform participants." Part of that work examines how platforms design their search results and how those design choices affect market power.
Chatbots and the Decline of Search
With Nicolas Padilla and Anja Lambrecht of London Business School and his UCLA colleague Brett Hollenbeck, Lam used Comscore desktop browsing data from 2022 and 2023 to compare early chatbot adopters with people who started later. The paper, accepted at Management Science in 2026 with Lam and Padilla as equal first authors, found that searching changed little for about 20 weeks and then fell. Question-style searches declined while navigational searches for a single brand held steady, smaller websites lost visits while the most visited sites did not, and display ad exposures dropped.
The UCLA Anderson Review summed up the pattern in plain terms: users "tended to keep using web search as an address book but stopped asking it questions."
AI Content and Creative Markets
In a paper with Sam Goldberg accepted at The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Lam studied a large stock images marketplace that began letting artists sell labeled AI-generated images in December 2022. Image production rose 136% and total sales 82%, while sales of images made without AI fell 28%.
A separate study with Jessica Fong and Olivia R. Natan, under revision at Marketing Science, found that the first mention of AI in a YouTube video's top comments cut its views by 10% on average. In an accompanying experiment, labeling a video as AI reduced the chance that viewers picked it by 23%.
From the Reserve Bank of Australia to UCLA
Before graduate school, Lam spent four years as a senior analyst at the Reserve Bank of Australia, where he modeled mortgage defaults in securitization vehicles. He holds a BA in economics from the University of New South Wales and a PhD in economics from Northwestern University, and joined UCLA Anderson in 2022.