Hello! I’m Si ZUO 左思

Welcome to My Site

I am a third-year Ph.D. in Strategy and Business Economics, Johnson Graduate School of Management & Economics Department, Cornell University. 

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My research interests are theory & empirical industrial organization. Specifically, I am interested in online markets, platforms, retailing, and remote working technology.

CV

Price Signaling and Reputation Building:  Evidence from a Consulting Platform, with Yangguang Huang and Chenyang Li

Covered by South China Morning Post. Presented in International Industrial Organization Conference (2022, Boston, scheduled), North America SummerMeeting (2022, Miami, scheduled), Asia-Pacific Industrial Organization Conference (2021, NUS)

Stores Going Online: Market Expansion or Cannibalization? , with Yangguang Huang and Chenyang Li

Abstract:
With the rise of e-commerce, more and more chain stores have opened online sales channels. For one chain, there are usually one online store and many offline stores. Online stores may cannibalize the sales of the existing physical stores because of their advantage in lower shopping costs. On the other hand, the online sales channel is usually a tool for advertisement, which may expand the offline store's market. From our novel daily revenue data of 380 offline stores from 2016 to 2020, we identify the countervailing cannibalization effect and the informative effect of opening up online branches on offline stores. We first use exogenous demand shocks (weather, Covid-19, and online shopping festivals) to provide solid evidence of these two effects. We then separately estimate these two effects by a structural model. We find that the cannibalization effect dominates the informative effect in most cases. The electronics category has the largest cannibalization effect, while the cosmetics and jewelry category has the smallest.

Externality Within the Shopping Mall, with Tianli Xia

Abstract:
Many papers show there exists the externality among shops within a mall or shopping street, but there is little study about how the externality changes across space and categories. Using the novel daily data of 380 stores in a large mall from 2016 to 2020, we identify the externalities from anchor stores using the anchor stores' promotional events. We adopt a new IV for a store's promotion: the promotional events of the other stores under the same brand in the same city. Then we show how the externalities vary across floors, distance, and store categories, which is unique to the existing literature. Finally, we use simulations to illustrate how rent contracts and store allocations could internalize the externalities among shops and provide managerial suggestions.

How Does Remote Working Shape the Commercial Real Estate Industry?

Abstract:
Remote working is changing how people work and where people live. Firms' locations are also changing because of the lower usage of the office, the larger labor market, and the less dependence on the agglomeration. Using the 2014-2022 remote working, housing prices, and demographic data in Japan, I solve the spatial equilibrium where workers and firms choose locations together. I identify remote working technology's effect on workers' housing choices and firms' office location choices and decompose the location changes to remote working effect, covid effect, recession effect, and policy effect. In addition, I predict the post-covid remote working rate and the long-term real estate market changes. This paper conquers the identification difficulty of separating the remote working effect from the covid effect and provides policy suggestions for the post-covid real estate industry and city planning.

Teaching