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INTEREST CATEGORY: MARKETING RESEARCH
POSTING TYPE: Awards

Posted by: P. K. Kannan

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Shunyuan Zhang wins 2025 V. “Seenu” Srinivasan Young Scholar Award in Quantitative Marketing

A committee of world-renowned senior marketing scholars has unanimously selected Shunyuan Zhang as the winner of 2025 V. “Seenu” Srinivasan Young Scholar Award in Quantitative Marketing.  Shunyuan Zhang is Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School.

The award is facilitated by Stanford University, University of Memphis, and Friends of “Seenu” Srinivasan in honor of V. “Seenu” Srinivasan, Adams Distinguished Professor of Management Emeritus at Stanford University.  This award recognizes important contributions by a young scholar to quantitative marketing, with the quality of the journals and research weighted much more than quantity.  The quantitative research in marketing could be methodological, theoretical, and/or empirical.  A young scholar eligible for the award should have received a marketing (or related) doctoral degree no more than six years prior to receipt of the award. The award is based on a specific body of work, which is either published or accepted for publication in scholarly marketing journals.

The committee took the following considerations in selecting Shunyuan as the winner.  Shunyuan Zhang graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2019 and joined the Harvard Business School. She has not only been remarkably productive, publishing papers in Management Science (3), Journal of Marketing Research (2), Marketing Science (2) and Journal of Consumer Research (2) but her research has also gained several recognitions for her research. Shunyuan Zhang’s research lies at the intersection of digital platforms, artificial intelligence, and economic inequality, with a strong focus on the sharing economy. Her work applies cutting-edge methods, such as machine learning, computer vision, and causal inference, to address high-impact marketing and policy questions. In one notable study published in Management Science, she quantifies the aesthetic features of Airbnb property images and demonstrates how professional photography significantly influences consumer demand. This work earned her runner-up honors for the 2019 INFORMS Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award and an Adobe Data Science Research Award. Another project, published in the Journal of Marketing Research, leverages Uber and Lyft’s exit from Austin to reveal demand complementarities between ride-sharing and home-sharing platforms. Her recent work, published in Marketing Science, investigates how Airbnb’s smart-pricing algorithm affects racial disparities in host earnings, showing that AI can help mitigate economic inequality when adopted. This research gained national recognition, including a citation in the 2023 Economic Report of the President and features in Fortune, Financial Times, and Forbes, in addition to being a finalist for the 2022 John Little Award.  Shunyuan also serves on the editorial review board of Marketing Science.

The winner will be recognized at the MR SIG reception and award ceremony during the 2025 Summer ��������� Conference in Chicago.  MR SIG welcomes you to the reception on August 23rd at 5:30 pm.

P. K. Kannan

On behalf of ��������� MR SIG

Previous Srinivasan Award Winners

2024 – Zhenling Jiang
2023 – Andrey Simonov
2022 – Beth Fossen
2021 – Xiao Liu
2020 – Ron Berman
2019 – Eric Schwartz
2018 – Pinar Yildirim