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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 (2024), "The Power of Livestream Shopping: Boosting Revenues
and Catalyzing Spillovers," Read paper.
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Livestream shopping has attracted significant attention in the e-commerce world, but its actual benefits for online sellers are still under debate. We investigate how adopting the livestream shopping channel affects seller performance by analyzing 2,851 online sellers who used this sales channel from September 2019 to June 2020. After applying multiple estimators to address a series of identification challenges, we find that adopting this channel boosts the sellers’ total revenue by about 106%. Notably, 46% of this revenue increase comes from the online store channel, indicating a positive cross-channel spillover effect from the livestream shopping to the online store channel. The adoption of the livestream shopping channel proves especially advantageous for small-scale sellers, enabling rapid expansion and increased competitiveness in the e-commerce marketplace. In addition, we find that the sellers’ use of livestream shopping not only helps reduce product uncertainty through information provision but also strengthens the consumer-seller relationship. Moreover, despite the average price for the same product being 7.3% lower in the livestream shopping channel than in the online store channel, which may partially drive the overall revenue increase, the distinctive attribute of livestream shopping—enhanced visibility of price promotions—does not explain the cross-channel spillover effect.
Barak Libai, Eitan Muller and Verena Schoenmueller (2024), "The XaaS Life Cycle: Buzzers, Adopters, Users, Money,"
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With the rise of recurring consumption models much of the research on new product growth has become less relevant to modern markets. Historically, this research centered on first-purchase models tailored for durable goods, where adoption served as a strong proxy for profits. However, the rise of recurring consumption business models—often termed XaaS, or "everything as a service"—now characterizes many new product sectors. Within the XaaS framework, adoption merely signifies the beginning of the growth of a user base and a continuously evolving revenue stream. Managers, investors, and analysts in the XaaS realm, who focus on the evolution of revenues and profit over time, therefore require an innovative lifecycle view. However, the shift towards XaaS thinking remains underrepresented in how marketing researchers understand the product growth lifecycle. This article introduces a comprehensive framework for examining XaaS growth. We propose that understanding XaaS growth demands an examination of a three-tiered sequence: Adopters, Users, and Money. We offer insights into the trajectory of these tiers and their interconnections and outline the ramifications of redirecting new product growth research toward the emerging XaaS landscape.
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