Shunyuan Zhang is an assistant professor in the Marketing unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches the first-year Marketing course in the MBA required curriculum.

Professor Zhang studies the sharing economy and the marketing problems that the dynamics of this new economy present. She deploys machine learning methods including deep learning to extract useful information from unstructured data. Combining this information with structured data, Professor Zhang conducts thorough analysis and policy simulations to examine important issues emerging in the sharing economy arena.

Professor Zhang earned a Ph.D. in Marketing/Business Technology from Carnegie Mellon University, Tepper School of Business. She has a B.S. in Physics from the University of Science and Technology of China.

Journal Articles

Zhang, Shunyuan, Dokyun Lee, Param Singh, and Tridas Mukhopadhyay. "Demand Interactions in Sharing Economies: Evidence from a Natural Experiment Involving Airbnb and Uber/Lyft." Journal of Marketing Research (JMR) 59, no. 2 (April 2022): 374–391. View Details
Zhang, Shunyuan, Kannan Srinivasan, Param Singh, and Nitin Mehta. "AI Can Help Address Inequity—If Companies Earn Users' Trust." Harvard Business Review Digital Articles (September 17, 2021). View Details
Zhang, Shunyuan, Dokyun Lee, Param Singh, and Kannan Srinivasan. "What Makes a Good Image? Airbnb Demand Analytics Leveraging Interpretable Image Features." Management Science (forthcoming). View Details
Ordenes, Francisco Villarroel, and Shunyuan Zhang. "From Words to Pixels: Text and Image Mining Methods for Service Research." Journal of Service Management 30, no. 5 (2019): 593–620. View Details
Zhang, Shunyuan, Nitin Mehta, Param Singh, and Kannan Srinivasan. "Frontiers: Can an AI Algorithm Mitigate Racial Economic Inequality? An Analysis in the Context of Airbnb." Marketing Science 40, no. 5 (September–October 2021): 813–820. View Details
Zhang, Shunyuan, Param Singh, and Anindya Ghose. "A Structural Analysis of the Role of Superstars in Crowdsourcing Contests." Information Systems Research 30, no. 1 (March 2019): 15–33. View Details

Working Papers

Cheng, Magie, and Shunyuan Zhang. "Reputation Burning: Analyzing the Impact of Brand Sponsorship on Social Influencers." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 22-067, April 2022. View Details
Zhang, Shunyuan, Kaiquan Xu, and Kannan Srinivasan. "Risk Sensitivity or Social Signaling? Unmasking Behaviors with Video Analytics." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 21-143, June 2021. (SSRN Working Paper Series, No. 3871144, June 2021.) View Details

Cases and Teaching Materials

Zhang, Shunyuan, and Sunil Gupta. "Perfect Diary." Harvard Business School Case 522-030, August 2021. View Details

Research Summary

Overview

Professor Zhang uses machine learning to address marketing problems that have arisen within the nascent sharing economy. She conducts rigorous analyses of structured and unstructured data generated by new sharing economy platforms to address important issues emerging in the sharing economy. Using data on the home sharing company Airbnb, Professor Zhang and colleagues have investigated the economic impact of using verified images (photos taken with an Airbnb professional photographer) to advertise a property on the platform. Her findings were featured in the article “How Much Is an Image Worth? Airbnb Property Demand Estimation Leveraging Large Scale Image Analytics.” In a related paper “Can Lower-quality Images Lead to Greater Demand on AirBnB?” Professor Zhang and her co-authors built structural models using Airbnb data to explore factors that influenced hosts’ decisions on what photographs to post, and explored policies that Airbnb can employ to improve hosts’ adoption of higher-quality photos and thereby improve profitability for both the hosts and Airbnb.

Awards & Honors

Winner of the 2020 Emerald Literati Award for Highly Commended Papers for "From Words to Pixels: Text and Image Mining Methods for Service Research" (Journal of Service Management, 2019) with Francisco Villarroel Ordenes.

Winner of the 2019 William W. Cooper Doctoral Dissertation Award in Management or Management Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Runner up for the 2019 Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award from INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) for “A Structural Analysis of Sharing Economy Leveraging Location and Image Analytics Using Deep Learning.”

Additional Information

Areas of Interest