Yulin Hao

Working papers

Shaping the Influencers: The Role of Multi-Channel Networks (with Xiaojie Li)
- [Draft] Revise & Resubmit at Journal of Marketing Research

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.

2. Store Visits, Locations, and Customer Perceptions: Market Structure Analysis with Customer Trajectories in Shopping Malls (with Dai Yao)

- [Draft] Reject & Resubmit at Marketing Science

Using 10 million customers' trajectory data from 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.

Selected work-in-progress

3. Time Cost Illusions: Under-engagement in Online Education (with Jingcun Cao, Zengxiang Chen, Yufeng Huang)

Consumers often purchase online courses but fail to engage. We show that marketing messages—which downplay the true time cost of learning—contribute to this purchase–usage gap. We develop a structural model of purchase, usage, and learning to quantify the welfare impact and assess how alternative platform designs might mitigate this inefficiency.

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