I am a fifth-year Ph.D. in Strategy and Business Economics, SC Johnson Graduate School of Management & Economics Department, Cornell University.
My research interests are industrial organization and quantitative marketing. Specifically, I am interested in platform, online retailing, recommendation systems and rating algorithms. I use casual inference, structural estimation, machine learning, and game theory model for my research.
I am passionate about teaching and am the lead instructor of Cornell Johnson NCC 4530/5530 Marketing Management in Fall 2023. Syllabus
Hello! I’m Si ZUO 左思
How to say my name? See Zoo-oh
Research
Working Paper & Work in Progress
Price Signaling and Reputation Building: Evidence from a Service Platform, with Yangguang Huang and Chenyang Li (new version updated! )
Covered by South China Morning Post.
Abstract:
To build a reputation on online platforms, new firms need to accumulate reviews through sales and consider the corresponding pricing strategy. We construct a dynamic model with both price signaling and a review-based reputation system. A high-quality firm can signal its unobserved quality by setting a lower introductory price than that of a low-quality firm because the high-quality firm benefits more from accumulating reviews in early periods. Using data from Zaihang, a service platform, we find empirical evidence that experts with high unobserved ability indeed adopt low introductory prices. We use an expert's performance on another platform as an instrument for the expert's ability to provide evidence for the causal relationship. The price and sales dynamics in the data are also consistent with the model predictions. The platform can accelerate quality revelation by facilitating price signaling. To do so, platforms could make price comparison easier and provide training to new firms about signaling.
Stores Going Online: Market Expansion or Cannibalization? , with Yangguang Huang (HKUST) and Chenyang Li (HKUST Guangzhou)
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.
Consumer Learning in the Presence of Personalized Recommendations, with Omid Rafieian (Cornell)
Bundling Promotion on Online Platforms, with Vrinda Kadiyali (Cornell) and Young-hoon Park (Cornell)
Teaching
Instructor
NBA 6955 Industrial Organization, Consulting and Business Strategy, Fall 2022
MBA Elective Course (also open for Graduates), Course Designer, and Lead Instructor.
32 students enrolled, Evaluation 4.4/5.
SC Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University.
NCC 4530/5530 Marketing Management, Fall 2023
Undergraduate Businese Minor (also open for Graduates), Lead Instructor
SC Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University.
Teaching Assistant
MBA Courses
AI for Marketing Strategy (with Lab Sessions), MBA Elective Course, for Prof. Emaad Manzoor, SC Johnson, Cornell, Spring 2023
Data Analysis and Modeling (with Sessions), MBA Core Course, for Prof. Omid Rafieian, SC Johnson, Cornell, Summer 2022
Microeconomics for Management, MBA Core Course, for Prof. Yi Chen & Prof. Michael Waldman, SC Johnson, Cornell, Summer 2021 & Fall 2020
Strategy, Cornell-Tsinghua Finance MBA Core Course, for Prof. Thomas Jungbauer, SC Johnson, Cornell, Winter 2021 & Spring 2021
Ph.D. Courses
Applied Microeconomics II: Game Theory, Ph.D. Core Course, for Prof. Michael Waldman, Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell, Spring 2022
Microeconomics Theory I (with Sessions), Ph.D. Core Course, for Prof. David Easley, Economics Department, Cornell, Fall 2021