Zhang, Wei (张帷)

Zhang W, Yiu K (2026) Balancing Flavor and Heritage: Optimizing Tenant Mix at QINGYUN Marketplace.

Set in Guiyang’s vibrant Qingyun Marketplace, this case explores how management balances commerce and culture in China’s booming night market economy. As dining stalls generate the most revenue but risk overshadowing cultural and entertainment elements, the managers must optimize the tenant mix to sustain both profitability and heritage. Using real data on shop composition, footfall, and sector sales, students apply business analytics and causal reasoning to estimate the cross-sector effect. It turns out that a cultural shop on average can drive higher revenue for the dining sector than the direct sales generated by either an individual dining stall or a cultural shop itself, which shows that commercial profitability and cultural heritage can thrive in harmony.

Zhang W, Chen J (2019) Digging for Gold with Data Analytics at Chow Tai Fook.

The Chow Tai Fook (CTF) case introduces an important challenge for data analytics in the jewelry or luxury product industry. It is difficult to provide an accurate demand prediction for a product at CTF. The reasons are mainly three-fold. First, the jewelry products are of high value and slow-moving, with mostly single digit sales numbers over a year. Second, the demand of a product partly depends on the availability of other products, due to customers’ demand substitution behavior. Lastly, there are 16 product categories with more than 15,000 distinct products offered by CTF, but each customer only chooses from a small subset of these products. In this case, traditional statistical methods such as linear regression or time series forecasting are not useful. I teach students how to use discrete choice models to tackle this challenge.

Tam ATL , Lam AWT, Chiu KNH, Chen LYT, Shen H, Zhang W (2018) Grab overtaking Uber: The David versus Goliath of Ride-Hailing App in Southeast Asia.

This case study on Grab, a locally founded ride-hailing startup in ASEAN, traces its development from its humble start to its victory of ousting Uber in 2018, uncovers the elements that contributed to Grab’s success, and provides inspiration on how Asian companies can possibly prevail over the more established Western counterparts despite of great adversity. The report compares the development of both Grab and Uber. Factors behind the success of Grab for each turning point are closely examined. Potential difficulties faced by Grab and recommendations to solve the problems are also identified. Grab manifests the spirit of “think global and act local” to succeed in the sharing economy by putting feet on the ground and resolving real “pain points” for consumers.