1.Time Cost Illusions: Purchase-Usage Gap in Online Education (with Jingcun Cao, Zengxiang Chen, Yufeng Huang)
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)
Random dorm assignment groups sales agents with roommates sharing their hometown, dialect, or alma mater, giving exogenous variation in informal ties. Exploiting this setting, we show that informal ties are a first-order driver of turnover but have no discernible effect on performance.