Publications
Publications
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- November 2024 (Revised April 2025)
- 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 billions of views on social media platforms in China and overseas as the... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Toward a Better Understanding of Open Ecosystems: Implications for Policymakers
By: Feng Zhu and Carmelo Cennamo
The digital realm is undergoing a significant transformation, marked by the emergence of platform
business models and the concept of open ecosystems. This paper delves into the intricate nature of
ecosystem openness, underscoring the point that the openness of... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Fantuan
By: Feng Zhu and David Lane
In 2023, CEO Randy Wu was considering the optimal growth strategy for Fantuan, a restaurant food delivery platform that had expanded from its 2014 founding in Vancouver, Canada to serve the Chinese demand for Asian cuisine in urban markets across Australia, Canada, the... View Details
Keywords: Business Startups; Customer Focus and Relationships; Diasporas; Entrepreneurship; Digital Platforms; Growth Management; Business Strategy; Diversification; Expansion; Growth and Development Strategy; Food and Beverage Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; United States; Canada; United Kingdom; Australia
- July 2023
- Article
Marketplace Scalability and Strategic Use of Platform Investment
By: Jin Li, Gary Pisano, Richard Xu and Feng Zhu
The scalability of a marketplace depends on the operations of the marketplace platform as well as its sellers’ capacities. In this study, we explore one strategy that a marketplace platform can use to enhance its scalability: providing an ancillary service to sellers.... View Details
- 2023
- Book
Research Handbook on Digital Strategy
By: Carmelo Cennamo, Giovanni Battista Dagnino and Feng Zhu
This state-of-the-art Research Handbook presents a comprehensive overview of the key strategic challenges that firms face when dealing with digital markets, platforms, and products and services, from old strategy questions in need of different solutions to entirely... View Details
Keywords: Digital Strategy
- July 2021
- Article
Information Transparency, Multihoming, and Platform Competition: A Natural Experiment in the Daily Deals Market
By: Hui Li and Feng Zhu
Platform competition is shaped by the likelihood of multi-homing (i.e., complementors or consumers adopt more than one platform). To take advantage of multi-homing, platform firms often attempt to motivate their rivals’ high-performing complementors to adopt their own... View Details
- May 2021
- Article
Ideology and Composition Among an Online Crowd: Evidence From Wikipedians
By: Shane Greenstein, Grace Gu and Feng Zhu
Online communities bring together participants from diverse backgrounds and often face challenges in aggregating their opinions. We infer lessons from the experience of individual contributors to Wikipedia articles about U.S. politics. We identify two factors that... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Time Dependency, Data Flow, and Competitive Advantage
Data is fundamental to machine learning-based products and services and is considered strategic due to its externalities for businesses, governments, non-profits, and more generally for society. It is renowned that the value of organizations (businesses, government... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Gender Inequality in Research Productivity During the COVID-19 Pandemic
By: Ruomeng Cui, Hao Ding and Feng Zhu
We study the disproportionate impact of the lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak on female and male academics' research productivity in social science. The lockdown has caused substantial disruptions to academic activities, requiring people to work from home.... View Details
- February 2021
- Article
Trust and Disintermediation: Evidence from an Online Freelance Marketplace
By: Grace Gu and Feng Zhu
As an intermediary improves trust between the two sides of its market to facilitate matching and transactions, it faces an increased risk of disintermediation: with sufficient trust, the two sides may circumvent the intermediary to avoid the intermediary’s fees. In... View Details
- March 2020
- Module Note
Business Model Transformation in the Platform Age
By: Feng Zhu
Although some digital platforms are highly successful, most firms today are still traditional product- or service-based firms. To take advantage of the opportunities created by platform business models, traditional firms can work with existing platforms to become their... View Details
- May–June 2019
- Article
U-Shaped Conformity in Online Social Networks
By: Monic Sun, Michael Zhang and Feng Zhu
We explore how people balance their needs to belong and to be different from their friends by studying their choices of a virtual-house wall color on a leading Chinese social-networking site. The setting enables us to randomize both the popular color and the adoption... View Details
- October 2018
- Article
Competing with Complementors: An Empirical Look at Amazon.com
By: Feng Zhu and Qihong Liu
Platform owners sometimes enter complementors' product spaces to compete against them directly. Prior studies have offered two possible explanations for such entries: platform owners may target the most successful complementors so as to appropriate value from their... View Details
- September 2018
- Article
Do Experts or Crowd-Based Models Produce More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia
By: Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu
Organizations today can use both crowds and experts to produce knowledge. While prior work compares the accuracy of crowd-produced and expert-produced knowledge, we compare bias in these two models in the context of contested knowledge, which involves subjective,... View Details
- April 2018 (Revised November 2019)
- Case
JD: Envisioning the Future of Retail (A)
By: Feng Zhu and Shirley Sun
JD, China’s second largest e-commerce company by gross merchandise volume (GMV) after Alibaba, had expanded rapidly from 2012 to 2016. When the company celebrated its 13th birthday in 2017, Richard Liu, its founder, deliberated on the company’s growth strategies. The... View Details
- January 2018 (Revised October 2019)
- Case
ZBJ: Building a Global Outsourcing Platform for Knowledge Workers (A)
By: Feng Zhu, Weiru Chen and Shirley Sun
ZBJ.com (ZBJ), an online platform that connects knowledge workers to small- and medium-sized enterprises, is China’s largest outsourcing platform. Founded by Mingyue Zhu in 2006, ZBJ had grown into a unicorn with 4,000 employees and a daily transaction volume of RMB15... View Details
- Article
Repositioning and Cost-Cutting: The Impact of Competition on Platform Strategies
By: Robert Seamans and Feng Zhu
Organizational structures are increasingly complex. In particular, more firms today operate as multi-sided platforms. In this paper, we study how platform firms use repositioning and cost-cutting in response to competition, elucidate external and internal factors that... View Details
- April 2017 (Revised January 2020)
- Case
Korea Telecom: Building a GiGAtopia (A)
By: Shane Greenstein, Feng Zhu and Kerry Herman
Korea Telecom (KT) has committed $4 billion in investments and R&D to build a GiGAtopia, essentially ushering in the next generation of mobile (5G) and wired infrastructure. CEO Dr. Chang-Gyu Hwang, and his team are considering which areas to prioritize in terms of new... View Details
- January 2017 (Revised August 2019)
- Case
X Fire Paintball & Airsoft: Is Amazon a Friend or Foe? (A)
By: Feng Zhu and Angela Acocella
Three years after launching his brick-and-mortar store, X Fire Paintball and Airsoft, Steve Herbert Sr. and his sons began selling products on Amazon.com’s third-party Marketplace, and online sales expanded rapidly. Over time, X Fire noticed that products of which it... View Details
- January 2017 (Revised August 2019)
- Supplement
X Fire Paintball & Airsoft: Is Amazon a Friend or Foe? (B)
By: Feng Zhu and Angela Acocella
Three years after launching his brick-and-mortar store, X Fire Paintball and Airsoft, Steve Herbert Sr. and his sons began selling products on Amazon.com’s third-party Marketplace and online sales expanded rapidly. Over time, X Fire noticed that products of which it... View Details