These are some of my current projects (comments and suggestions are welcome)

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Weiqing Zhang, Zekun Liu, Xiao Liu, and Eitan Muller, (2022), "Doubling Revenues by Adopting Livestream Shopping:
A Synthetic DiD Approach," Read paper.

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While livestream shopping has attracted enormous attention in the e-commerce world, whether and how it can help online sellers remains questionable. We study the effect of adopting the livestream shopping channel on seller performance. We analyze 2, 851 online sellers who adopted the livestream shopping channel from September 2019 to June 2020. To tackle
a series of identification challenges, we use three different estimators, two-way fixed effect DiD (TWFE), staggered DiD, and synthetic DiD (SynDiD). We find that adopting the livestream shopping channel increases sellers’ total revenue by 107%. Moreover, 47% of the total revenue increase is attributed to the online store channel, suggesting a positive cross-channel spillover effect from the livestream shopping channel to the online store channel. We further examine the mechanisms and find supporting evidence that livestream shopping can not only reduce consumer uncertainty about products via information provision, but also increase consumers’ awareness of sellers by offering sellers broader exposure to the public. In addition, although the average price for the same product is 7.6% lower in the livestream shopping channel, which may partially contribute to sellers’ increased overall revenue, we find that the salience of price promotions in the livestream shopping channel cannot explain the cross-channel spillover effect.

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Michael Haenlein, Eitan Muller and Roman Welden (2022), "On Consumption Experience and Scale of Stakeholder-Based Disruption," Read Paper.

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The theory of disruptive innovation, popularized by Clayton Christensen, has shaped the thinking of generations of managers. Unfortunately, despite its significant influence, it is much more a theory of why firms fail than a theory on disruption. Consequently, many evolutions that would conventionally be considered disruptive innovations, such as ride-sharing, smartphones, and video games, are not seen as such within this framework. Our article presents a new theory of disruptive innovation based on the change the innovation triggers among industry stakeholders, namely consumers, producers, suppliers and retailers, and producers in related industries. We propose a mechanism that drives disruption via a peripheral consumption experience that evolves and integrates into the core consumption experience. This shift in the core consumption experience, in turn, shifts the behavior of other stakeholders in the industry, eventually supplanting the incumbent technology. We provide a scale that allows measuring the degree of disruption an innovation represents and show that our concept better reflects the common understanding of disruptive innovations in the marketplace. We illustrate our theory using the video game ecosystem, which has seen substantial innovations over the past two decades, none of which would be considered disruptive in the traditional sense.

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Zekun Liu, Weiqing Zhang, Xiao Liu, Eitan Muller, and Feiyu Xiong (2022), "Success and Survival in Livestream Shopping," Read paper.

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The livestream shopping industry, in which consumers can purchase products directly from live video sessions, is expected to exceed $60 billion in China in 2021 and $25 billion in the US in 2023. Despite the popularity of livestream shopping, many sellers fail within just a few weeks. We investigate the lead indicators of the success and survival of livestream shopping sellers. We ask three questions: 1. Livestream viewers can make purchases directly within the session (the “within-channel direct selling effect") or can use the session to gain information that may inform purchases later on (the “cross-channel spillover effect”). Which of the two effects is more important for seller success? 2. Livestream shopping encompasses three industries: e-commerce, social networks, and entertainment. Which industry-specific key performance indicators (KPIs) predict success? 3. Some sellers use livestream shopping for new product introduction while others use it for mature product inventory liquidation. Which type of seller is more likely to survive? We use a unique dataset from Taobao Live to show that: 1. Sellers who rely more heavily on the within-channel direct selling effect (vs. the cross-channel spillover effect) are less likely to succeed. 2. The e-commerce KPI positively predicts success, while the entertainment KPI negatively predicts success. For the social network KPIs, reach positively predicts success, but engagement rate negatively predicts success, reinforcing the cross-channel spillover effect of livestream shopping. 3. Mature product sellers are more likely to succeed than new product sellers.

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