1.Time Cost Illusions: Purchase-Usage Gap in Online Education (with Jingcun Cao, Zengxiang Chen, Yufeng Huang); JMP
Many consumers purchase online courses but underuse them. We show this is driven by a time cost illusion: consumers underestimate learning effort at purchase. Effort-downplaying marketing amplifies this bias, shifting demand toward high-effort courses. We develop a structural model to quantify the illusion, welfare losses, and platform design counterfactuals. 2. Shaping the Influencers: The Role of Multi-Channel Networks (with Xiaojie Li)
Many influencers are not independent creators with full control over their content and business strategies. Instead, they are influenced by the influencer agencies (MCNs) they affiliate with. We leverage influencers' entry into and exit from these agencies on TikTok to examine how influencer agencies affect their content creation and monetization.3. Store Visits, Locations, and Customer Perceptions: Market Structure Analysis with Customer Trajectories in Shopping Malls (with Dai Yao)
Using 10 million customers' trajectory data in shopping malls, we tailor a language (embedding) model to construct store co-visitation patterns, and decompose this measure into stated brand preference and physical location. We show how our metric improves the understanding of substitution patterns using store closure shocks and counterfactual location changes.4. Informal Ties and Sales Agent Turnover: Evidence from Randomized Dormitory Assignment (with Hongye Sun, Mitchell Lovett and Kun Peng)
Anecdotes suggest that workplace friendships reduce turnover, but causal evidence is scarce. Using randomized dormitory assignment in a large salesforce, we show that informal ties—such as sharing a dorm with a coworker from the same hometown—meaningfully improve retention for salespeople.5. Content Creator Multihoming and Attention Spillovers Across Platforms (with Xinzhi Rao, Jingyan Dai and Liangfei Qiu)
Complementor multihoming is usually seen as bad for platforms. We show the opposite: when creators adopt a second platform, they often bring new followers back to the first and thus boost engagement. These attention spillovers can benefit both creators and incumbent platforms.