Speaker: Xingbo ZhANG, National University of Singapore)

Abstract: People commit the sunk cost fallacy when their decisions are influenced by costs that have already been incurred and cannot be reversed. The implication of the sunk cost fallacy is that the price discount may reduce consumption. Recently the gambling- or lottery-type price discount is drawing more and more attention to its impact on consumer buying decision. However, it is unclear how this probabilistic price discount affects consumption when the sunk cost fallacy is implicated, and how it differs from the sure price discount with equal expected monetary value. In a large-scale randomized field experiment conducted in a museum, we compare the impact of these two price discount schemes on consumption behavior – the length of time customers stayed in the museum. We found that the length of stay is more likely to be reduced by the probabilistic price discount than by the sure price discount. In another treatment condition, we offered the customer a choice between the probabilistic price discount and the sure price discount. We found that customers in the condition with choice stayed longer than the other two conditions without choice. Overall, the results are consistent with a diminishing sensitivity to sunk cost and a reference-dependent sunk cost effect.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Zhang Xing's field of study is the intersection of marketing and behavioral economics. He mainly uses experimental methods to study how companies should formulate price policies and design choice menus after considering the psychological bias of decision-making. His research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and Management Science. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing from the National University of Singapore.

Speaker: Harald Hau (University of Geneva)

Abstract: People commit the sunk cost fallacy when their decisions are influenced by costs that have already been incurred and cannot be reversed. The implication of the sunk cost fallacy is that the price discount may reduce consumption. Recently the gambling- or lottery-type price discount is drawing more and more attention to its impact on consumer buying decision. However, it is unclear how this probabilistic price discount affects consumption when the sunk cost fallacy is implicated, and how it differs from the sure price discount with equal expected monetary value. In a large-scale randomized field experiment conducted in a museum, we compare the impact of these two price discount schemes on consumption behavior – the length of time customers stayed in the museum. We found that the length of stay is more likely to be reduced by the probabilistic price discount than by the sure price discount. In another treatment condition, we offered the customer a choice between the probabilistic price discount and the sure price discount. We found that customers in the condition with choice stayed longer than the other two conditions without choice. Overall, the results are consistent with a diminishing sensitivity to sunk cost and a reference-dependent sunk cost effect.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Zhang Xing's field of study is the intersection of marketing and behavioral economics. He mainly uses experimental methods to study how companies should formulate price policies and design choice menus after considering the psychological bias of decision-making. His research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and Management Science. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing from the National University of Singapore.

Speaker: Tony Tong (University of Colorado)

Abstract: Digital platforms are becoming increasingly important to businesses today by leveraging the Internet to provide instant access to big data and instantaneous connections for participating firms and users.  The seminar develops a value-based strategy framework to integrate streams of research on platform governance and design, elucidates ways platform owners create and capture value, and discusses several directions for future research.

About the Speaker:

Tony Tong is a professor of strategy & entrepreneurship in the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado.  He conducts research at the intersection of strategy, innovation, and globalization, studying M&As, alliances, multinational firms, patents & intellectual property rights, and digital innovation.  He has published in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Journal of International Business Studies, Research Policy, Nature: Scientific Data, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal.  His research has received several honors including the winner of the Strategic Management Society Best Conference Paper Prize, and awards from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.  He is a cofounder of the Chinese Patent Data Project, which aims to link Chinese patents to various types of firms and make the linked patent-firm data publically available for research.

Professor Tong teaches Strategic Management, Global Strategy, and Technology & Innovation Management in the undergraduate, MBA, and executive programs.  His teaching has won several awards and recognitions from the University of Colorado, Purdue University, Ohio State University, and CKGSB.  He is an author of several teaching case studies of the competitive and global strategies of Chinese multinational firms (e.g., Huawei, Xiaomi, Didi).

He serves on the editorial review boards of Academy of Management Journal, Global Strategy Journal, Strategic Management Journal, and Strategic Organization, and was a coeditor of the Advances in Strategic Management – Real Options Theory.  His other service to the profession includes service on the Research Committee of the Business Policy & Strategy Division of the Academy of Management, organizing several annual Patent PDWs at the AOM, and serving as a senior faculty advisor of the BPS Managing Your Dissertation Workshop and the BPS Junior Faculty Consortium.

He received a B.A. from the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade, an M.S. from the National University of Singapore, and a Ph.D. from the Fisher College of Business at the Ohio State University.

Speaker: Xu GUAN, Wuhan University

Abstract: We investigate a seller’s voluntary disclosure strategy when serving two groups of consumers who arrive sequentially and are reference-dependent towards product quality. Consumers may be myopic or sophisticated, depending on whether they can make rational inferences from the seller's disclosure behavior as well as the experienced consumer's quality review. We show that when consumers are myopic, the seller strategically discloses/withholds his high-quality information when the magnitude of reference effect is low/high. However, when consumers are sophisticated, the seller can hardly withhold any quality information unless the magnitude of reference effect is sufficiently high. The seller is more likely to disclose his quality information to the sophisticated consumers than to the myopic ones. When consumers possess heterogenous quality preferences, this allows the seller to design more delicate disclosure strategy towards myopic consumers but prohibits the seller from concealing the quality information from sophisticated consumers. We show that the above insights are quite robust regardless of whether the review rating is bounded or not, whether the consumer type changes over the periods or whether the seller can endogenously choose which group of consumers to serve first.

About the Speaker:

Guan Xu, a professor at the School of Economics and Management of Wuhan University. He was selected as a young scholar for a leading talent program at Wuhan University. His research interests are mainly supply chain management in an information asymmetry environment for the digital economy. In the past 5 years he published 24 papers in Production and Operations Management, Naval Research Logistic, Decision Sciences and other international authoritative SCI/SSCI search journals.

Speaker: Liang ZOU (University of Amesterdam)

Abstract: Compound utility theory (Zou, 2006 AEF) proposes a two-stage process for decision making under risk. In the first stage, the decision maker evaluates his expected utility EU for upside reward and expected disutility ED to downside risk of all feasible actions. He then chooses in the second stage the action that offers the best utility-disutility tradeoff according to his compound utility function V(EU, ED). In this paper, we apply compound utility theory to portfolio choice and asset pricing and show that, under two mild axioms, EU and ED reduce to expected gain and expected loss, where the reference point defining gain and loss is the risk-free return. In such a setting, the shape of V captures investors’ risk attitudes, and the capital market is gain-loss efficient. The equilibrium condition implies then a simple, dichotomous stochastic discount factor for pricing all assets and contingent claims on these assets. If at-the-money options on the market portfolio are tradable, then gain-loss efficiency also implies mean-variance efficiency and the dichotomous asset pricing model (Zou, 2005 AEF) holds. We provide a brief discussion of the empirical issues regarding the validity of the CAPM and various multifactor models.

About the Speaker:Dr. Liang Zou from the University of Amsterdam holds a BSc degree in mathematics (1982, Peking Univ.), MBA (1986, KUL Belgium), and Ph.D. in economics (1990, CORE Belgium). Being an active researcher, he has published many articles in top-tier international journals, some of which being influential in providing insights into ownership structure and efficiency, reforming state-owned enterprises and economic transitions in China. His research has been ranked the 5th among the top 40 business economists in the Netherlands and Belgium (Flemish region), and the 3rd among the top 15 financial economists in the Netherlands. He has served as director of the Master of Science program for the Amsterdam Business School and helped the school develop into today’s modern faculty of international reputation.

Speaker: Jieying CHEN (University of Manitoba, Canada)

Abstract: Numerous research has suggested information seeking as a way to reduce uncertainty. Applying the framework of hierarchical model of approach/avoidance orientations, we investigated when and how uncertainty, as a negative stimulus, can increase approach-oriented information seeking behavior. Daily diary data were collected from two samples of newcomers (Study 1: Mtime on job = 2 months; Study 2: Mtime on job = 1.67 months) on five consecutive mornings and afternoons. In both studies, we found that work uncertainty did not have a main effect on information seeking behavior. However, avoidance orientation moderated this relationship, such that newcomers with high avoidance orientation were more likely to engage in information seeking behavior when work uncertainty was high. Information seeking behavior was in turn predictive of role clarity. We also found a positive effect of role clarity on voluntary turnover one year after entry. These results demonstrate that avoidance orientation can catalyze newcomersapproach-oriented information seeking behavior under uncertainty, which has important ramifications for organizations.

About the Speaker: Dr. Chen Jieying is an assistant professor at the Esper School of Business at the University of Manitoba, Canada, and a Ph.D. from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include cross-cultural adaptation, new employee orientation, focus (mindfulness), and strategic human resource management. Her research has been published in Psychological Bulletin and Organizational Psychology Review.

Speaker: Wenlan QIAN, National University of Singapore

Abstract: This paper studies the offline consumer spending response to China’s Singles’ day—the world’s largest E-Commerce shopping holiday held annually on November 11th. Using debit and credit card transactions of a large, representative sample of consumers from the world’s top card payment service provider, we investigate the within-individual change in offline card spending around the Singles’ day from 2013 to 2017. Consumer card spending at the brick-and-mortar stores increased by an average 11% on Singles’ day. Such an increase is driven by spending of physical retail goods at offline stores. Offline spending on dining, entertainment and travel appears no different from the baseline period. On the other hand, spending on service goods declined in the one-week period around the Singles’ day. The spending increase is prevalent across a variety of consumer demographics and characteristics. Gauging the mechanism, we show a stronger (and more persistent) spending response on products for which consumers value the shopping experience, namely at department & apparel, home furnishing, and electronics stores (relative to supermarkets). Back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the offline spending increase on the Singles’ day in 2017 amounts to 20% of the same-day online sale (RMB 254 bn.).

About the Speaker:

Professor Qian Wenqi is an associate professor of finance at the National University of Singapore Business School (Dean’s Chair) and deputy director of the Real Estate Institute of the National University of Singapore. He is currently the Associate Editor of Financial Management and Real Estate Economics. She holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Qian Wenqi's main research interests are family finance, real estate, financial technology and financial intermediation. Her research is published in top academic journals such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Review of Economics and Statistics, Management Science, Review of Finance.

Speaker: Ze WANG (University of Central Florida)

Abstract: While previous work has focused on the positive impact of smiles on interpersonal perceptions, this research proposes and finds that smile intensity differentially affects two fundamental dimensions of social judgments—warmth and competence. A marketer displaying a broad smile, compared to a slight smile, is more likely to be perceived by consumers as warmer but less competent. Furthermore, the facilitative effect of smile intensity on warmth perceptions is more prominent among promotion-focused consumers and in low-risk consumption contexts, while the detrimental effect of smile intensity on competence perceptions is more likely to occur among prevention-focused consumers and in high-risk consumption situations. Field observations in a crowdfunding context further indicate that the effects of smile intensity on warmth and competence perceptions have downstream consequences on actual consumer behaviors.

About the Speaker:

Ze Wang is Associate Professor in Marketing at the College of Business Administration. She received her PhD from University of Kansas in 2010. Dr. Wang’s research focuses on consumer behavior and customer experience analysis. In specific, her research interests span and combine three main areas: employee-customer interface and frontline management, social media and consumer-generated content analysis, and the cognitive and affective biases in consumers’ judgment and decision making. Her work has been published at Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing Science, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Experimental Psychology, among others.

Dr. Wang is strongly committed to bring new insights from research to the classroom. She collaborates with local business community in guest speaker series and “live” projects to provide practical learning experience to students. At University of Central Florida, Dr. Wang delivers a variety of courses including Marketing Strategy, Consumer Behavior, Services Marketing, Doctoral Seminar on Consumer Behavior, and Directed Independent Research.

Speaker: Jialin Yu (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

Abstract: Standard predictability regressions use return as dependent variable, which is the sum of change in dividend-price (dp) ratio and dividend growth, even though dividend growth is known to be noisy. We construct a new predictor based solely on the dp dynamics and show it outperforms the historical aver-age. Our predictor does not even require estimation for long-horizon return, yet it outperforms the best known prediction approach based on dp. We re-late our approach to structural estimation, which reveals that dp dynamics is informative for return prediction in real time. Our evidence cautions against using reduced-form return regressions to evaluate channels of predictability.

About the Speaker:

Professor Yu Jialin is currently an associate professor of finance at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has served as an associate professor of finance at Columbia Business School and an associate professor at Princeton University. Professor Yu Jialin holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University and a BA in Economics from Fudan University in Shanghai. Professor Yu Jialin's research specializes in investment and behavioral finance. His research papers have been published in leading international academic journals: including US economic reviews, financial journals, financial economics journals, financial research reviews, and more. Professor Yu Jialin's research on Chinese stock derivatives was cited as the research background by the 2013 Nobel Prize. His research also won the first “Sun Yefang Financial Innovation Award” in 2015. In addition, his research has received funding and awards from Morgan Stanley, KPMG, and the Hong Kong government. He has received honorary teaching awards and outstanding teaching honors from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Speaker: Long W. “Rico” Lam(University of Macau)

Abstract: I will present a newly developed typology of three-way interaction models. In this talk, I will explain how to approach moderation based on three-way interactions, introduce three types of three-way interaction models, and provide the appropriate post-hoc statistical procedures accordingly. I will also outline several future research examples to demonstrate how three-way interactions can be used in Asian management research.

About the Speaker:

Lin Lang is the professor of the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Macau, a doctorate in management from the University of Oregon, and a former vice president of the Asian Institute of Management. Professor Lin is currently engaged in research areas such as trust, emotional work needs, proactive behavior, and dirty work. His published journals include: Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Human Relations, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Leadership Quarterly, Journal Of Business Research, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Journal of Business Ethics, etc. Professor Lin's research on "trust and dirty work" is also included in the 2012 China Organizational Behavior Handbook. He is currently a senior editor of Asia Pacific Journal of Management, an editorial advisor to the Journal of Human Resource Management, a editorial advisory board for the Journal of Managerial Psychology, and a member of the editorial review board for the Journal of Trust Research.