Shunyuan Zhang’s research while affiliated with Harvard Medical School and other places

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Publications (19)


Serving with a Smile on Airbnb: Analyzing the Economic Returns and Behavioral Underpinnings of the Host’s Smile
  • Article

August 2024

Journal of Consumer Research

Shunyuan Zhang

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Elizabeth M S Friedman

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Non-informational cues, such as facial expressions, can significantly influence judgments and interpersonal impressions. While past research has explored how smiling affects business outcomes in offline or in-store contexts, relatively less is known about how smiling influences consumer choice in e-commerce settings when there is no face-to-face interaction. In this article, we use a longitudinal Airbnb dataset and a facial attribute classifier to quantify the effect of a smile in the host’s profile photo on property demand and identify factors that influence when a host’s smile is likely to have the biggest effect. A smile in the host’s profile photo increases property demand by 3.5% on average. This effect is moderated by a variety of host and property characteristics that provide evidence for the role of uncertainty underlying why smiling increases demand. Specifically, when there is greater uncertainty regarding either the quality of the accommodations or the interaction with the host, a host’s smile will have a greater effect on demand. Online experiments confirm this pattern, offering further support for uncertainty perceptions driving the effect of smiling on increased Airbnb demand, and show that the effect of smiling on demand generalizes beyond Airbnb.









What Makes a Good Image? Airbnb Demand Analytics Leveraging Interpretable Image Features

December 2021

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201 Reads

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90 Citations

Management Science

We study how Airbnb property demand changed after the acquisition of verified images (taken by Airbnb’s photographers) and explore what makes a good image for an Airbnb property. Using deep learning and difference-in-difference analyses on an Airbnb panel data set spanning 7,423 properties over 16 months, we find that properties with verified images had 8.98% higher occupancy than properties without verified images (images taken by the host). To explore what constitutes a good image for an Airbnb property, we quantify 12 human-interpretable image attributes that pertain to three artistic aspects—composition, color, and the figure-ground relationship—and we find systematic differences between the verified and unverified images. We also predict the relationship between each of the 12 attributes and property demand, and we find that most of the correlations are significant and in the theorized direction. Our results provide actionable insights for both Airbnb photographers and amateur host photographers who wish to optimize their images. Our findings contribute to and bridge the literature on photography and marketing (e.g., staging), which often either ignores the demand side (photography) or does not systematically characterize the images (marketing). This paper was accepted by Juanjuan Zhang, marketing.


EXPRESS: Demand Interactions in Sharing Economies: Evidence from a Natural Experiment Involving Airbnb and Uber/Lyft

November 2021

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42 Reads

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16 Citations

Journal of Marketing Research

We examine whether and how ride-sharing services influence the demand for home-sharing services. Our identification strategy hinges on a natural experiment in which Uber/Lyft exited Austin, Texas, in May 2016 due to local regulation. Using a 12-month longitudinal dataset of 11,536 Airbnb properties, we find that Uber/Lyft’s exit led to a 14% decrease in Airbnb occupancy in Austin. In response, hosts decreased the nightly rate by $9.3 and the supply by 4.5%. We argue that when Uber/Lyft exited Austin, the transportation costs for most Airbnb guests increased significantly because most Airbnb properties (unlike hotels) have poor access to public transportation. We report three key findings: First, demand became less geographically dispersed, falling (increasing) for Airbnb properties with poor (excellent) access to public transportation. Second, demand decreased significantly for low-end properties, whose guests may be more price-sensitive, but not for high-end properties. Third, the occupancy of Austin hotels increased after Uber/Lyft’s exit; the increase occurred primarily among low-end hotels, which can substitute for low-end Airbnb properties. The results indicate that access to affordable, convenient transportation is critical for the success of home-sharing services in residential areas. Regulations that negatively affect ride-sharing services may also negatively affect the demand for home-sharing services.


Citations (14)


... In comparison, while projects like CryptoPunks have innovated in terms of artistic style, Yuan Yuan, Xiao Liu, Shunyuan Zhang, and Kannan Srinivasan have noted that female CryptoPunks typically trade at a 36.8% lower price than male CryptoPunks, and Black CryptoPunks at a 30.7% lower price than their White counterparts [3]. This contrast offers a unique perspective on how digital art challenges social norms. ...

Reference:

The Shaping of Digital Collectibles: Digital Imprints of Gender and Cultural Representation in the Age of the Non-Fungible Tokens Boom
Gender and racial price disparities in the NFT marketplace
  • Citing Article
  • August 2024

International Journal of Research in Marketing

... Lastly, Bertolini, Clevert, and Montanari introduced an aggregation method that generalizes attribution maps between any two convolutional layers of a neural network (Bertolini, Clevert, and Montanari 2023). R-XAI has also been used in many applications, for instance in healthcare Weinberger, Lin, and Lee 2023) and business (Feng, Li, and Zhang 2023). ...

Visual Uniqueness in Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces: Machine Learning Model Development, Validation, and Application
  • Citing Article
  • January 2023

SSRN Electronic Journal

... The home-sharing economy involves uncertainty and information asymmetry between peer providers and customers, and photos can reduce the uncertainty by heightening social presence and the ability to visualize the experience (Ert, Fleischer, & Magen, 2016). Customers in the P2P context rely heavily on photos to make purchase decisions (Zhang, Mehta, Singh, & Srinivasan, 2019). Prior studies have tested several effects involving the photos of peer providers and properties. ...

Do Lower-Quality Images Lead to Higher Demand on Airbnb?
  • Citing Article
  • January 2023

SSRN Electronic Journal

... This support can come from family recommendations or observed use by peers. Social influences are crucial as they affect how older adults think about and feel toward technology, influencing their digital engagement (Zhang S Y, et al., 2023). Despite the clear importance of these social aspects, research on leveraging this influence to promote elderly Fintech engagement is limited. ...

Frontiers: Unmasking Social Compliance Behavior During the Pandemic
  • Citing Article
  • April 2023

Marketing Science

... As both of these levers can further enhance generative text-to-image models' effectiveness (Jansen et al., 2024;Rombach et al., 2022), our results likely represent a lower bound for the performance of AI-generated marketing imagery. The emergence of future generative AI models will likely improve the synthetic images' perceptual ratings and realworld effectiveness, especially when combined with task-specific data for model calibration (Feng et al., 2023). ...

Marketing Through the Machine's Eyes: Image Analytics and Interpretability
  • Citing Chapter
  • March 2023

... Other publications directly predict relevant Marketing Outcomes from images. Examples include return rate prediction (Dzyabura et al. 2019), inference of design aesthetics (Burnap et al. 2021), or other subjective variables such as number of likes, or visual potential of being a celebrity (Feng et al. 2022) (e.g., for selecting suitable endorsers for campaign collaboration). Lastly, articles on Content & Context identify product content on images or classify the product usage or consumption context. ...

An Ai Method to Score Celebrity Visual Potential from Human Faces
  • Citing Article
  • January 2021

SSRN Electronic Journal

... Pioneering models such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) [28], Vision Transformers (ViT) [14], and Diffusion Models [56,57] have demonstrated efficacy across di-* Equal contribution. verse applications, including medical imaging, retail, and e-commerce [9,19,35,40,58,70]. These models can be applied as tools for image editing tasks, significantly enhancing image customization for specific needs. ...

What Makes a Good Image? Airbnb Demand Analytics Leveraging Interpretable Image Features
  • Citing Article
  • December 2021

Management Science

... Concentration is typically identified as congestion in the urban context [17,28,31,32,68,83,[117][118][119][120][121]. Segregation is a situation in which groups of users are set apart from each other [122,123]. Some outcomes emerge at the individual or model level only. ...

Frontiers: Can an Artificial Intelligence Algorithm Mitigate Racial Economic Inequality? An Analysis in the Context of Airbnb
  • Citing Article
  • September 2021

Marketing Science

... Race significantly shapes users' perceptions and trust in AI (M. K. Lee & Rich, 2021;S. Zhang et al., 2021). We argue that Non-White users in America are more likely to experience algorithmic aversion or automation bias compared to White users. ...

Can an AI Algorithm Mitigate Racial Economic Inequality? An Analysis in the Context of Airbnb
  • Citing Article
  • January 2021

SSRN Electronic Journal

... Given their importance, profile photos have long caught the attention of scholars, who started studying them in the first decade of the twentyfirst century from different fields such as psychology (e.g., Hudson & Gore, 2017;Leary & Allen, 2011), communication (Bond, 2009;Gibbs et al., 2006;Hancock & Toma, 2009;Mesch & Beker, 2010, among many others), or marketing and consumer behaviour (Bente et al., 2012;Fagerstrøm et al., 2017;Jang, 2022;Tussyadiah & Park, 2018;Zhang et al., 2020). ...

Serving with a Smile on Airbnb: Analyzing the Economic Returns and Behavioral Underpinnings of the Host’s Smile
  • Citing Article
  • January 2020

SSRN Electronic Journal