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I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Marketing and the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University. I received my Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2025.
My research focuses on information as a product that consumers are willing to pay for, as well as the motivations driving agents to participate in information exchange.
Please find my CV here.
Kindly contact me at mengqi.zhang@colorado.edu or mengqi@clemson.edu if you would like to know more about me and my research.
My current research agenda encompasses the following topics (Please expand for more details):
Conspicuous Consumption and Consumer Behavior
Consumers are often willing to pay a premium for the conspicuous signal, which incentivizes sellers to strategically design it to capture higher markups. My Paper on this topic challenges a common but rarely questioned assumption: that consumers have full information about market demand. Instead, I explore how conspicuous consumption can be sustained as a market equilibrium when consumers use price as a signal to infer the firm’s private information about demand, and how this, in turn, shapes their perception of conspicuous value.
Bayesian Persuasion and Receiver Motivation
A signal sender can design information to influence the receiver’s beliefs and decisions, with important applications in advertising and personal selling. However, effective information design also depends on the receiver's motivation to process that information. My Paper on this topic examines how the sender can strategically extend the persuasion process to overcome receiver inattention and improve the overall effectiveness of persuasion.
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