Published or Accepted Papers:
Heterogeneous Complementarity and Team Design: The Case of Real Estate Agents
MKSC, Latest draft, Slides, Replication files (Yan Xu, Mandy Hu, Junhong Chu, and Andrew Ching, Marketing Science, 2024)
Abstract:
Workers often have unobserved characteristics, e.g., soft skills, that are important for teamwork. We study heterogeneous complementarity between individuals working in teams and investigate what types of individuals make better teams. We formulate and estimate a model of teamwork that imposes no functional form restrictions on the complementarity between different types of workers. Our modeling approach builds on stochastic block models in statistics ( e.g., Bickel et al., 2013) and the econometric framework developed by Bonhomme (2021) that quantifies individual contributions when only teams' outputs are observed. We apply our model to data from a leading Chinese real estate company; the data contain the complete history of team assignments, team performances, and detailed property characteristics. We find that complementarity between different team members is heterogeneous, which is hard to capture with commonly used production function forms. Workers whose solo performance is at the intermediate level complement all other types of workers the most. The best solo-performing workers, however, are not the best team players. Our findings suggest that firms can improve productivity by redesigning teams without incurring additional hiring costs. We use counterfactual experiments to restructure teams based on the uncovered type complementarity and find that overall team output improves by as high as 28.4%.
Keywords: networks, teamwork, heterogeneous complementarity, unobserved heterogeneity, salesforce
Consumer Time Budgets and The Nature of Grocery
MS, Latest draft, CEPR working paper version, Replication files (Bart Bronnenberg, Tobias Klein and Yan Xu, Management Science, 2023)
Abstract:
We construct a novel household panel data set that combines purchase records with information on labor market status and other demographics to study the relationship between purchase behavior and the availability of time. Our main results revolve around the question whether the availability of time also changes the types of products households buy. To answer this question we develop an approach to classify products according to the time it takes to turn them into consumption experiences and an empirical approach that builds on this classification. We find that the availability of additional time shifts a household's shopping bundle towards more time-intensive market goods. This novel finding implies that product- and retail-innovations aimed at forward-integrating into household production are important drivers of demand in CPG industries.
Keywords: consumer purchase behavior, household production, demand for variety, timeuse, retirement
Entrepreneurial Learning and Disincentives in Crowdfunding Markets
MS, Latest draft, Replication files (Yan Xu and Jian Ni, Management Science, 2022)
Abstract:
Reward-based crowdfunding has enabled entrepreneurs to interact with consumers even before product launches. However, this market persistently suffers from a high failure rate; that is, entrepreneurs fail to launch and deliver their products as promised. We investigate the extent to which this high failure rate is because of information distortion—entrepreneurs have uncertainty about consumers’ evaluation of the new products. We model the product launch decisions of different types of entrepreneurs who raise funds through preselling on reward-based crowdfunding platforms and subsequently decide whether to continue with the product launch. To do so, we collect structured and unstructured data from Kickstarter’s digital video game category and classify attributes using supervised learning methods. We develop and estimate an integrated model of crowdfunding demand and entrepreneurs’ product launch decisions. We find that the information entrepreneurs gather from crowdfunding sales has sizable impacts on the product launch decisions of entrepreneurs with low managerial capital or new to the crowdfunding platform. Our counterfactual simulations suggest that platform policy regulating overfunded projects can reduce the product launch failure rate by about 13%.
Keywords: reward-based crowdfunding, entrepreneurship, pre-launch learning, supervised learning
Vulnerability to Natural Disasters and Sustainable Consumption: Unraveling Political and Regional Differences
PNAS, Replication files (Rebecca Chae, Rafay Siddiqui, and Yan Xu, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025)
Abstract:
The urgent calls for action on climate change underscore the importance of increasing sustainable behavior among individuals who have traditionally veered away from it, such as those on the political right. Utilizing data from four geopolitical regions across 24 countries, we explore whether vulnerability to natural disasters, brought on by either experiencing or anticipating a natural disaster, is a crucial factor. We find that as vulnerability to natural disasters increases, sustainable consumption intentions significantly increase among rightists in Western Europe, Israel, and the United States. Environmental motives, rather than economic or trend motives, are found to drive this effect. This suggests that, for rightists, the expectation of being directly impacted by climate change can override their established attitudes and foster more sustainable behavior with the goal of helping the environment. In contrast, the same increase in sustainable intentions is weaker for leftists, who already embrace sustainable behavior to a large extent. Interestingly, in Central and Eastern Europe, this interplay between political ideology and vulnerability to natural disasters is absent, highlighting the unique post-communist context of this region. These findings underscore the necessity of tailored strategies for promoting sustainable behavior across regional contexts, and provide vital insight for how sustainable consumption may increase among groups that have traditionally resisted it. In a quasi-experiment, we test the potential of an intervention using messages that highlight recent natural disasters in one’s locality, and demonstrate its effectiveness in pushing rightists towards sustainable consumption.