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Publications
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- April 2025
- Article
Serving with a Smile on Airbnb: Analyzing the Economic Returns and Behavioral Underpinnings of the Host’s Smile
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Elizabeth Friedman, Kannan Srinivasan, Ravi Dhar and Xupin Zhang
Non-informational cues, such as facial expressions, can significantly influence judgments and interpersonal impressions. While past research has explored how smiling affects business outcomes in offline or in-store contexts, relatively less is known about how smiling... View Details
- Working Paper
AI in Disguise—How AI-generated Ads' Visual Cues Shape Consumer Perception and Performance
By: Yannick Exner, Jochen Hartmann, Oded Netzer and Shunyuan Zhang
Generative AI’s recent advancements in creating content have offered vast potential to transform the advertising industry. This research investigates the impact of generative AI-enabled visual ad creation on real-world advertising effectiveness. For this purpose, we... View Details
- November 2024
- Case
Cheerful Music
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Feng Zhu and Nancy Hua Dai
Established by Snow Jiang in 2019 in Shenzhen, China, Cheerful Music was a record label company that had created many hit songs in China. “Yi Xiao Jiang Hu,” its most famous hit song, gained 50 billion views on TikTok as the background music for the Subject Three... View Details
- November 2024
- Case
Ather Energy: The Future of Mobility
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Kannan Srinivasan and Malini Sen
Ather Energy, India’s third-largest electric scooter maker by volume, was founded in 2013. Five years later, the start-up launched its first electric scooter, Ather 450, which was powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), to navigate... View Details
- May–June 2024
- Article
Should Your Brand Hire a Virtual Influencer?
By: Serim Hwang, Shunyuan Zhang, Xiao Liu and Kannan Srinivasan
Followers respond more favorably to sponsored posts by virtual influencers versus those by humans, costs are lower, and creating an influencer from scratch allows marketers to introduce more diversity. View Details
- March 2024
- Teaching Note
Loris
By: Shunyuan Zhang and Das Narayandas
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 524-010. View Details
- February 2024
- Teaching Note
UGG Steps into the Metaverse
By: Shunyuan Zhang and Sunil Gupta
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 523-013. View Details
- Working Paper
Visual Uniqueness in Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces: Machine Learning Model Development, Validation, and Application
By: Flora Feng, Charis Li and Shunyuan Zhang
Peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplaces have seen exponential growth in recent years featured by unique offerings from individual providers. Despite the perceived value of uniqueness, scalable quantification of visual uniqueness in P2P platforms like Airbnb has been largely... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
Loris
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Das Narayandas, Stacy Straaberg and David Lane
In December 2022, Loris’s executive team considered their go-to-market strategy. Loris was an artificial intelligence (AI) software startup for the customer service industry with two products on the market: 1) Agent Assist which provided customer service agents (CSAs)... View Details
- August 2023
- Case
Kariyer.net: Recruiting AI
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Fares Khrais and Namrata Arora
In 2017, Fatih Uysal (AMP 2021) became CEO of Kariyer.net. By then, the business was already the industry leading online job board in Turkey. However, faced with stalling growth, a turbulent macroenvironment, and growing competition from international players, Uysal... View Details
Keywords: Online Technology; Marketing; Websites; Artificial Intelligence; Innovation; Two-sided Platforms; Internet and the Web; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Job Search; Employment; Transformation; Volatility; Innovation and Invention; Disruptive Innovation; Management Practices and Processes; Business Growth and Maturation; Competitive Strategy; Business Startups; Talent and Talent Management; Cost vs Benefits; Macroeconomics; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Emerging Markets; Digital Platforms; Employment Industry; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry; Middle East; Turkey
- May–June 2023
- Article
Unmasking Behaviors During the Pandemic with Video Analytics
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Kaiquan Xu and Kannan Srinivasan
In 2020, as the novel coronavirus spread globally, face masks were recommended in public settings to protect against and slow down viral transmission. People complied to varying extents, and their reactions may have been driven by a variety of psychological factors.... View Details
- 2023
- Chapter
Marketing Through the Machine’s Eyes: Image Analytics and Interpretability
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Flora Feng and Kannan Srinivasan
he growth of social media and the sharing economy is generating abundant unstructured image and video data. Computer vision techniques can derive rich insights from unstructured data and can inform recommendations for increasing profits and consumer utility—if only the... View Details
- January 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Teaching Note
Perfect Diary (完美日记)
By: Shunyuan Zhang and Sunil Gupta
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 522-030. View Details
- November 2022 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
UGG Steps into the Metaverse
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Sharon Joseph, Sunil Gupta and Julia Kelley
In the fall of 2022, boot maker UGG and its parent company, Deckers, were working to position the brand in the nascent but fast growing metaverse. The metaverse, the online realm that individual users could navigate as digital avatars, was becoming more commercialized,... View Details
- August 2022
- Article
What Makes a Good Image? Airbnb Demand Analytics Leveraging Interpretable Image Features
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Dokyun Lee, Param Vir Singh and Kannan Srinivasan
We study how Airbnb property demand changed after the acquisition of verified images (taken by Airbnb’s photographers) and explore what makes a good image for an Airbnb property. Using deep learning and difference-in-difference analyses on an Airbnb panel dataset... View Details
- April 2022
- Article
Demand Interactions in Sharing Economies: Evidence from a Natural Experiment Involving Airbnb and Uber/Lyft
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Dokyun Lee, Param Singh and Tridas Mukhopadhyay
We examine whether and how ride-sharing services influence the demand for home-sharing services. Our identification strategy hinges on a natural experiment in which Uber/Lyft exited Austin, Texas, in May 2016 due to local regulation. Using a 12-month longitudinal... View Details
- September–October 2021
- Article
Frontiers: Can an AI Algorithm Mitigate Racial Economic Inequality? An Analysis in the Context of Airbnb
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Nitin Mehta, Param Singh and Kannan Srinivasan
We study the effect of Airbnb’s smart-pricing algorithm on the racial disparity in the daily revenue earned by Airbnb hosts. Our empirical strategy exploits Airbnb’s introduction of the algorithm and its voluntary adoption by hosts as a quasi-natural experiment. Among... View Details
- September 17, 2021
- Article
AI Can Help Address Inequity—If Companies Earn Users' Trust
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Kannan Srinivasan, Param Singh and Nitin Mehta
While companies may spend a lot of time testing models before launch, many spend too little time considering how they will work in the wild. In particular, they fail to fully consider how rates of adoption can warp developers’ intent. For instance, Airbnb launched a... View Details
- August 2021 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
Perfect Diary (完美日记)
By: Shunyuan Zhang and Sunil Gupta
Jinfeng (David) Huang founded Yatsen Holding Limited in 2016 and launched the first direct-to-consumer (DTC) cosmetic brand, Perfect Diary, in 2017. Perfect Diary used social influencers or key opinion leaders (KOL) to successfully build brand awareness and to grow... View Details
- Article
From Words to Pixels: Text and Image Mining Methods for Service Research
By: Francisco Villarroel Ordenes and Shunyuan Zhang