Job Market Paper

"Heterogeneous Spillover Effects of Negative News: Antecedents and Outcomes", with Guiyang Xiong, Eunkyu Lee, and Shuai Yang

Under Review at Journal of Marketing Research; Available upon request

Abstract: This study examines how a firm’s product crisis spills over to affect its industry rivals. Challenging the conventional wisdom, it shows that competitors do not necessarily benefit from such crises and identifies the antecedents to the heterogeneous spillover effects. The authors develop an analytical framework to systematically model three concurrent mechanisms (consumer switching effect, industry demand effect, and remedial cost effect) underlying the net spillover effect on a rival. Several key findings emerge from mathematical derivations of the analytical model and empirical analyses of a large-scale dataset compiled from various sources. First, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between firm similarity and spillover effect: the stock returns of rivals that are highly similar or dissimilar to the firm in crisis are more adversely affected than the moderately similar ones. Second, the effectiveness of corporate capabilities in mitigating negative spillovers is contingent: marketing capability is more effective for rivals with low or high (but not moderate) similarity to the affected firm, while R&D capability becomes more effective as similarity increases. Finally, stock price declines due to spillover effects motivate rival firms to make subsequent strategic adjustments, reflected in increased focus on marketing-related hires versus R&D-related ones, especially in less concentrated industries.

Selected Research in Progress

AI applications in Marketing

From Capabilities to Agents: A Closed-Loop Framework of Generative AI for Marketing Productivity

Work in progress; manuscript writing. With Guiyang Xiong.

Driving into the AI Age: The Effects of Autonomous Vehicles on Consumer Safety

Work in progress; data collection. With Ruichun Liu.

Social Media Communication

Antecedents and Outcomes of Female Representation in Marketing Communication

Work in progress; data analysis. With Guiyang Xiong and Liangbin Yang.

Design Order in Chaos: How Symmetrical Aesthetics Symbolically Restore Consumer Agency under Uncertainty

Manuscript ready; preparing for submission to Journal of Marketing Research. With X. Li and Y. He.

Studies on Individual Education Attainment and Financial Decisions

Work in progress. With Guiyang Xiong, Alison Xu, Pengyuan Wang, Keith Wilcox, and Gayoung Choi.

I apply a range of methods across text mining, image analysis, applied econometrics, and analytical modeling to address marketing problems.

Text Analysis

Transforming unstructured text into quantitative measures of similarity, style, and sentiment to study marketing phenomena.

JMP: Heterogeneous Spillover Effects of Negative News: Antecedents and Outcomes

I use Doc2Vec, a neural embedding method that represents documents as vectors, to measure firm similarity based on firms’ business descriptions in annual filings.

Antecedents and Outcomes of Female Representation in Marketing Communication & Design Order in Chaos: How Symmetrical Aesthetics Symbolically Restore Consumer Agency under Uncertainty

I extract linguistic and semantic features from firm-generated social media captions, capturing elements such as post length, hyperlink and hashtag use, user mentions, sentiment tone, and the use of emojis as paralinguistic cues.

Image Analysis

Analyzing visual content to uncover patterns in facial representation, aesthetic design, and brand communication.

Antecedents and Outcomes of Female Representation in Marketing Communication

I apply DeepFace to detect facial attributes in firm-generated social media images and construct female representation scores, while also analyzing visual features related to color, composition, and object layout.

Design Order in Chaos: How Symmetrical Aesthetics Symbolically Restore Consumer Agency under Uncertainty

I measure symmetry scores of top brands’ social media images and also analyze visual features related to color, composition, and object layout.

Applied Econometrics and Analytical Modeling

JMP: Heterogeneous Spillover Effects of Negative News: Antecedents and Outcomes

I use analytical modeling to systematically examine how spillovers form through consumer switching effect, industry demand effect, and remedial cost effect, complementing econometric analyses of firm data.