Tea Time (and Serious Thoughts) for Management
Jun 05-2024
At Academic Afternoon Tea (ATT) on June 3, 2024, Prof. Ma Jingjing took the attendants on a fruitful walk in the domain of management studies. She is NSD Associate Professor of Management, Mu Lan Scholar, and Deputy Dean of BiMBA Business School. It marked the 12th event of ATT in the 2024 spring semester, which aims to promote cross-disciplinary exchange among NSD faculty members and students.
Prof. Ma first set forth the research content and methodology in management, which spans Strategic Management, International Business, and Marketing, among others. Then she delved into Marketing from the perspectives of business school lectures and consumers. In the academic sphere, Marketing has been divided into sub-fields along disciplinary and methodological lines. The sub-fields include Consumer Behavior, Quant/Modelling, and Marketing Strategy. She pointed out that these areas have seen increasingly more overlapping and convergence in analytical methods, namely a pivot towards big-data based analysis.
Taking an ongoing research project by her team as an example, Prof. Ma demonstrated the topics and methods in Marketing research. The project concerns online donations for medical charity causes. The internet platforms for such donations list numerous charity projects and thus work like shopping sites. Consequently, the donation-soliciting projects depend a lot on their headlines and introductory words.
Medical fundraisers tend to focus on major illnesses, so a common approach is to put the name of the illnesses in the headlines to tap the viewers’ empathy. Yet actual data do not back up such a presumption; one potential reason is that headlines incorporating the names of serious diseases might cause viewers to have ‘anticipate distress’ and therefore lower their donation intentions. To probe and verify the existence (or not) of such an influencing mechanism, Prof. Ma and her collaborators set out to utilize the second-hand data on Tencent’s charity platform and conduct a series of random experiments. They hoped the research results would provide better guidance for online charity platforms to finetune their marketing strategies.
Regression analysis of the second-hand data found that appearances of the lingo of major diseases evidently lowered donation completion rate, which was accompanied by a drop in donation amounts. To further conduct causal analysis, Prof. Ma’s team undertook a series of field research, whose comparison of experiment groups and control groups turned out to support the ‘anticipate distress’ hypothesis.
In the last part of the event, Prof. Ma briefly introduced some of her other research projects and discussed with the participants about issues such as experiment design and causal identification.
