Jinzhao Du 杜金钊

Publications

1. Jinzhao Du and Eddie Ning, "To Each Their Own: Personalized Product Offerings in Competition" Forthcoming in Management Science

With recent advancements in predictive technologies and the availability of more granular data on individual consumers, firms can leverage their diverse product portfolios to present products with different positioning to different consumers. This paper studies the competition between two firms that can personalize product offerings based on imperfect prediction technology. We characterize the firms' personalization strategies and product line pricing, and further examine how their ability to predict consumer preferences affects equilibrium strategies, profits, and consumer welfare.

2. Qin Zhou, Jingqi Wang, Yifan Jiao, and Jinzhao Du, "Balancing Supply with Demand on Ride-hailing Platforms in Markets with Price Regulations: An Operational Approach"  (authors in reverse alphabetical order) Forthcoming in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 

Ride-hailing platforms face a supply-demand imbalance. During peak periods, the demand from passengers far exceeds the supply of drivers, while during off-peak periods, there is an abundance of supply but weak demand. The well-studied surge pricing can be challenging to implement in markets where prices are subject to regulation and are inflexible to adjust. This paper studies an alternative operational approach that shifts the supply of drivers from off-peak to peak periods to address the supply-demand imbalance.  

3. Yuxin Chen, Jinzhao Du, and Ying Lei (2025), "The Interactions of Customer Reviews and Price and Their Dual Roles in Conveying Quality Information," Marketing Science, 44(1), 155-175. 

Consumers are increasingly turning to online reviews to evaluate product quality, yet the customer reviews have been widely documented to suffer from selection bias (i.e., not all consumers may voluntarily write reviews). This paper unveils the dual roles a review system plays in conveying quality information: In addition to directly communicate the quality information through customer reviews, the selection bias enables a review system to engage a seller in price signaling to reveal its quality.  In contrast to one’s intuition, the paper finds that selection bias in reviews may actually benefit consumers by inducing lower prices without compromising information communication.

4. Wilfred Amaldoss, Jinzhao Du, and Woochoel Shin (2024), "Pricing Strategy of Competing Media Platforms," Marketing Science, 43(3), 488-505.

This paper analyzes competing media platforms' choices between uniform and tiered pricing taking into account consumers' endogenous homing decisions. It shows that consumers' endogenous multihoming incentivizes platforms to compete more aggressively on the advertising side of the market and induces the Prisoner's Dilemma: Each platform may find it profitable to use tiered pricing, and yet when both platforms adopt tiered pricing strategy they are worse off. 

5. Wilfred Amaldoss and Jinzhao Du (2023), "How can Publishers Collaborate and Compete with News Aggregators?" Journal of Marketing Research, 60(6), 1114-1134.

News aggregators are growing in popularity among consumers in several parts of the world, and aggregators are adopting a variety of revenue models. The prevailing view is that aggregators pose an existential threat to publishers, and governments in several countries are stepping in to protect publishers. This paper identifies the role of news aggregators in unbundling a publisher's composite publication, which is not well studied in the existing work.  The paper demonstrates how this role can facilitate publishers’ price discrimination, motivating them to share content despite potential advertising revenue loss to the aggregator. 

6. Jinzhao Du and Ying Lei (2022), "Information Design of Matching Platforms when User Preferences are Bidimensional," Production and Operations Management, 31(8), 3320-3336.

Matching platforms, such as Match.com and BlaBlaCar, utilize a decentralized matching where users initiate and establish connections. This paper investigates how information design can enhance matching efficiency for such platforms. It shows that vertical information (i.e., match attributes where user preferences largely align) decreases matching efficiency, while horizontal information (i.e., match attributes where user preferences are idiosyncratic) improves matching efficiency. Additionally, the paper demonstrates that withholding receivers' vertical information results in the greatest improvement in matching efficiency, providing guidance for platforms seeking to optimize their matching capabilities.

7. Wilfred Amaldoss, Jinzhao Du, and Woochoel Shin (2021), "Media Platforms’ Content Provision Strategies and Sources of Profits," Marketing Science, 40(3), 527-547.

As multi-sided media markets are far more complex institutions than the traditional one-sided markets, it is difficult for a manager to conjecture how the different sides of a media market might interact, and even more difficult to choose the optimal strategy based on intuition or empirical data on a firm operating on one side of the market. This paper builds a theoretical model where media platforms interact with three sides of the market - content suppliers, consumers, and advertisers, and examines media platforms’ content provision strategies and the implications for platforms’ profits and content suppliers’ profits.

This paper was awarded the 2022 Research Output Prize in the Faculty of Economics and Finance at the University of Hong Kong.

Working Papers

1. Jinzhao Du and Juncai Jiang, "Monetization Strategy in the Crowd-Patronage Economy" Invited for 2nd Round Review, Information Systems Research

This paper studies the crowd-patronage markets where creators offer content for free and rely on voluntary patronage from consumers. Consumers patronize creators due to two motives: intrinsic desire for reciprocity and/or extrinsic desire for social image. This paper explores the optimal design of patronage schemes for content creators to monetize the two motives and achieve higher profits compared to using pay-what-you-want pricing.  

2. Wilfred Amaldoss and Jinzhao Du, "How Should Publishers Manage Gift Articles and Social Interactions? "

Consumers derive functional utility from the content of news articles. In addition, consumers gain social utility from interactions centered around these articles. Publishers such as The New York Times and The Financial Times allow their subscribers to gift articles to non-subscribers. This paper explores how publishers should manage gift articles and the social interactions driven by these articles. We find that gift articles may not cause revenue leakage; instead, by facilitating social interactions between competing publishers' consumer bases,  gift articles  can soften price competition and increase publisher profits. Next, the ad revenue earned from competitors' consumers through gift articles does not need to be passed on to consumers as a price subsidy. The paper further examines the strategic implications of various ways in which consumers interact within their social circles on publishers' gift article strategies. 

3. Jinzhao Du, “Leading by Expertise: Achieving Better Internal Communication of Consumer Knowledge From Marketing to Product Development"  Reject and Resubmit, Journal of Marketing Research

This paper examines how establishing organizational language as a standard can facilitate communication of consumer knowledge between marketing analysts and product engineers, and further explores the managerial configurations that can make communication efficient.