Title: Search Prominence among E-Commerce Platforms
Speaker: Yi Zhu, Margaret J. Holden and Dorothy A. Werlich Endowed Professor at the University of Minnesota
Time: 9:00 a.m., September 10,2025
Venue：Room 224, Building No.12, Wushan Campus
Introduction to the Speaker：
Yi Zhu is Professor of Marketing, and Margaret J. Holden and Dorothy A. Werlich Endowed Professor at the University of Minnesota. He received a PhD in Business Administration from the University of Southern California in 2013. He worked as a consultant at Shanghai Investment Consulting Corporation before he went to Vancouver, where he received an MA in Economics from University of British Columbia. His research interests focus on the application of industrial organization models in marketing, online auctions, consumer search, advertising, media slant, sharing economy and Chinese economy. His works have appeared or forthcoming at Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Production and Operations Management, and International Journal of Research in Marketing. Beyond academic publications, his research has been discussed in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, CBS, Entrepreneur, Star Tribune, Toronto Star, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Global News Radio among others.
Zhu's research has won a series of best-paper awards, including the John D.C. Little Award for the best marketing paper published in Marketing Science or Management Science, the Don Morrison Long Term Impact Award for making a significant long run impact on the field of marketing, the Shankar-Spiegel Best Dissertation Proposal Award, and the finalist for the Frank M. Bass Award for the best marketing paper derived from a PhD thesis published in INFORMS journals. He has been selected as a 2017 Marketing Science Institute (MSI) Young Scholars, a biennial award given to the most promising scholars in marketing who have distinguished themselves as potential leaders of the next generation of marketing academics, and the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) Scholars in 2022, a title awarded to "top scholars helping to set the research agenda for the field." In 2022, he was awarded the Carlson School Outstanding Teaching Award for Excellence in Teaching. Zhu currently serves as an Associate Editor for Marketing Science and is a member of the Editorial Review Board for the Journal of Marketing Research.
Abstract:
Prominent platforms such as Amazon, Airbnb, Etsy, and Zalando consistently attract significant consumer search traffic, and have become the default choice for many shoppers. The increasing prominence of these platforms raises concerns about potential adverse effects on both consumers and sellers operating on them. This paper investigates the impact of prominence among e-commerce platforms on market dynamics, while accounting for seller competition within and across platforms.
Using a simultaneous search model, we examine a novel tension stemming from platform prominence. Prominence can either draw in price-sensitive consumers, incentivizing sellers to compete on volume through lower prices, or capture less price-sensitive consumers, encouraging sellers to focus on margins and raise prices. We show that product complexity determines which outcome prevails, thereby explaining why prominence can push platform sellers to either raise or lower prices. We further identify conditions under which the acquisition of prominence by an e-commerce platform raises or lowers consumer surplus and seller profits. This leads to a simple empirical test for prominence’s pro-/anti-competitive effects using only trends in price data from the prominent platform.
