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Xing ZHANG
Contact
Department of Marketing
Phone: (+65) 8346 5835
Information
NUS Business School
E-mail: zhangxingis@gmail.com
Mochtar Riady Building, 15 Kent Ridge
Fax: (+65) 6779 5941
Singapore, 119245
Website: zhangxing.weebly.com
Research
Substantive: Behavioral Economics, Pricing, Organization Design
Interests
Methodological: Quantitative Modeling, Experimental Design
Education
National University of Singapore, Singapore
2009–2015 (expected)
Ph.D program in Marketing
Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, U.S.A.
2013 Fall
Visiting Student
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
2008-2009
Ph.D program in Economics
Jinan University, Guangzhou, China
B.A. in Economics
Papers Under
Revision
2007
• Maurice Schweitzer, Teck-Hua Ho, and Xing Zhang, “How Monitoring Influences Trust: A Tale
of Two Faces”, under minor revision at Management Science.
• Xing Zhang, Mikhail Monakhov, Poh San Lai, Soo Hong Chew, and Richard P. Ebstein, “Does
Oxytocin Promote Impulsive Buying?”, under 2nd round revision at Marketing Letters.
Working Papers
• Xing Zhang and Juin Kuan Chong, “Paying Enough to Go to the Gym – Sunk Cost Fallacy,
Self-control, and Price Contract Design”, Job Market Paper.
• Teck-Hua Ho, Ming Hsu, Xing Zhang, and Songfa Zhong, “Understanding Other-regarding
Mechanisms in Heterogeneous Populations”.
• Onn Siong Yim*, Xing Zhang*, Idan Shalev, Mikhail Monakhov, Songfa Zhong, Soo Hong
Chew, Poh San Lai, and Richard P. Ebstein, “An Epigenetic Marker for Impulsivity” (* Equal
contribution) to be submitted to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A..
Works in
• In-group Favoritism and Organization Design, joint with Ganesh Iyer.
Progress
Book Chapter
Richard P. Ebstein, Yushi Jiang, Xing Zhang, and Soo Hong Chew “Genetics, Personality and
Health Behaviors” in Behavioral Genetics of Temperament and Personality edited by Kimberly J.
Saudino and Jody M. Ganiban, Springer, forthcoming.
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Awards and
The First Prize in Poster Presentation, NUS Business School Annual PhD Research Day, 2015
Fellowships
(Consolation Prize in 2013 and 2014).
AMA-Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium Fellow, Northwestern University, 2014.
The First-Class Scholarship for Excellent Student, Jinan University, 2005.
Referee Services Economics Letters
Presentations
European Conference of the Association for Consumer Research, Barcelona, Spain, 2013.
Asia-Pacific Annual Meeting of Economics Science Association, Singapore, 2008.
National Academic Conference of Game theory and Experimental Economics, Beijing, China, 2006.
Workshops
International Workshop on Statistical Methodology for Human Genomic Studies, University of Col-
Attended
orado, Boulder, U.S.A., 2011.
Wellcome Trust School on Biology of Social Cognition, Cambridge, U.K., 2011.
Asia Summer Institute in Behavioral Economics, Singapore, 2010.
Neuro Social Science Workshop, Osaka University, Japan, 2009.
Teaching
Tutor for Principles of Marketing, Spring 2015.
Experience
Grader for Marketing Research and Marketing Management, 2013.
Guest lecturer in Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2010.
Languages
With Human: Chinese (native), English (fluent).
With Computer: Matlab, GAUSS, Stata, SAS, LATEX, z-Tree, PLINK.
Selected
Empirical Modeling
Coursework
Econometric Modeling I
Heejoon Han
Econometric Modeling II*
Tong Li (Vanderbilt U) & Tatsushi Oka
Marketing Seminar (Choice Models and Applications I)
Surendra Rajiv
Marketing Seminar (Choice Models and Applications II)
Junhong Chu
Marketing Seminar (Topics in Empirical Choice Models)*
Hai Che (Indiana U)
Dynamic Structural Models in Marketing and Economics
Nan Yang
Microeconometric Models of Consumer Demand*
Jean-Pierre Dub´e (Chicago)
Analytical Modeling
Microeconomics I (at HKUST)
Soo Hong Chew
Microeconomics II (at HKUST)
Tanjim Hossein
Mathematical Economics (at HKUST)
Susheng Wang
Game Theory
Weishi Lim
Marketing Seminar (Marketing Strategy and IO)*
Ganesh Iyer (UC Berkeley)
Special Topics in Marketing II*
Kannan Srinivasan (Carnegie Mellon U)
Other Related Coursework
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Abstract of
Working Papers
Neuroeconomics (at HKUST)*
Ming Hsu (UC Berkeley)
Marketing Seminar (Consumer Decision Processes)
Catherine Yeung
Special Topics in Marketing (Field Experiment)*
Norah Lim (Wisconsin U)
Behavioral and Experimental Economics
(Courses with * were offered by visiting professors)
Soo Hong Chew
• “Paying Enough to Go to the Gym – Sunk Cost Fallacy, Self-control, and Price Contract Design”
(with Juin Kuan Chong), Job Market Paper.
This paper examines the role of the sunk cost fallacy as a self-commitment device and its implication for optimal price contract design. Consumers evince the sunk cost fallacy if they condition
the consumption level on the sunk cost incurred in the past. Our empirical study suggests that
consumers are able to anticipate the fallacy associated with the health club membership fee ex
ante, and hence they may rationally exploit this fallacy to counteract their future self-control
problem in health club attendance. Therefore, a firm’s optimal price contract has to balance the
demand for flexibility due to the sunk cost fallacy and the demand for commitment due to the
self-control problem. Our results show that in the market for investment goods such as health
club attendance, the sunk cost fallacy may increase or decrease the consumer’s expected utility
depending on the degree of self-control problem. In the market for leisure goods such as casino
gambling, however, the consumer’s expected utility is always decreasing with the sunk cost fallacy. Our analysis on optimal two-part tariff contract reveals that the per-visit fee is increasing
with the sunk cost fallacy, and sometimes it should be charged higher than the marginal cost in
response to the concern of overconsumption problem. Interestingly, the lump-sum fee is decreasing with the sunk cost fallacy in the market for investment goods whereas is increasing with sunk
cost fallacy in the market for leisure goods. In equilibrium, the firm internalizes the behavioral
biases, and the social welfare is independent of the degree of sunk-cost fallacy and self-control
problem. At last, we examine the welfare implication for the consumers who are unaware of their
self-control problem, and find that the sunk cost fallacy may mitigate the consumer welfare loss
in the market for investment goods.
• “How Monitoring Influences Trust: A Tale of Two Faces” (with Maurice Schweitzer and TeckHua Ho), under minor revision at Management Science.
Organizations operate more effectively when managers trust their employees. In many cases,
however, managers and their employees have divergent interests. One common managerial approach to address the problem of misaligned incentives involves monitoring employee behavior. In
this paper, we investigate how monitoring changes the behavior of both those who are monitored
and those who monitor others. Across three experiments, we paired participants in repeated
trust games with different monitoring conditions. In each iteration of the repeated trust game,
a trustor must decide how much money to pass to a trustee. The money passed is either tripled
or quadrupled; the trustee must then decide how much money to return to the trustor. In each
of three studies, we included conditions with anticipated monitoring. When trustees could anticipate monitoring, they engaged in opportunistic behavior; they returned more money than
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they received when they anticipated that they would be monitored, but either returned a small
amount or nothing at all when they anticipated that they would not be monitored. Trustors,
however, failed to appreciate how strategically their counterparts would act and continued to
pass money to their counterparts even when they were unable to monitor them. Across three
studies, we find that trustors systematically over-relied on the compliant behavior they observed
during monitoring. We discuss managerial implications of these results for designing and using
monitoring systems.
• “Does Oxytocin Promote Impulsive Buying?” (with Mikhail Monakhov, Poh San Lai, Soo Hong
Chew, and Richard P. Ebstein), under revision at Marketing Letters.
Oxytocin, a nonapeptide hormone, is the paramount human social hormone modulating social
cognition and affiliative behaviors. Drawing on the extant literature on social aspects of buying
behavior, we found that people with higher plasma oxytocin levels, are associated with higher
scores in multiple measures of buying tendency, and people with higher plasma oxytocin level
spend more on conspicuous goods. All the effects are driven by females. The findings are consistent with the role of oxytocin in enhancing conformity and social affiliation, which potentially
increases buying tendency. Our study captures the social aspects of buying behavior at the psychological - neuroendocrinological level and opens a window into the role of this social hormone
in consumer buying behavior.
• “Understanding Other-regarding Mechanisms in Heterogeneous Populations” (With Teck-Hua
Ho, Ming Hsu, and Songfa Zhong).
Social injustice and altruism are daily occurrences in every society. When one individual treats
another unfairly, a bystander may step in to correct the injustice by punishing the norm-violator
or helping the victim. While the latter may be more efficient, experiments show that punishing the norm-violator is actually more effective in curbing undesirable behavior and maintaining
distributive social norms. We posit that a robust mechanism that enforces such norms must
accommodate heterogeneous (selfish or other-regarding) types of individuals and their strategic interactions. To model such a mechanism, we combined laboratory games with latent class
modeling to characterize the effects of the interactions between social justice mechanisms and
a mixture of selfish and other-regarding types. Specifically, we investigated a three-person, repeated game in which a third-party bystander could monetarily help the victim or punish the
norm-violator. We found that a model that allows for a mixture of types explains choice behavior
significantly better than a representative agent model. Critically, we found that the superiority
of the ’punish’ condition in enforcing norm-compliance depended on the norm-violator and the
third-party being other-regarding. In contrast, if either was selfish, norm-enforcement under the
’help’ condition was equal or superior to that under the ’punish’ condition. These results show
that it is crucial to know the proportion of types of individuals in order to best understand and
predict the effectiveness of a social mechanism so that it reinforces rather than impairs otherregarding behavior.
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• “An Epigenetic Marker for Impulsivity” (with Onn Siong Yim, Idan Shalev, Mikhail Monakhov,
Songfa Zhong, Soo Hong Chew, Poh San Lai, and Richard P. Ebstein), to be submitted to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A..
Leukocyte telomere length (LTL) is an emerging marker of aging at the cellular level. However,
little is known regarding its link with consumers‘ poor life choices that often entail being overly
impulsive in decision making. We measured the degree of impulsivity and relative LTL in a
sample of 1018 Han Chinese undergraduates using incentivized economic tasks. A highly significant correlation was observed between LTL and impulsivity (delay discounting) that was robust
controlling for age, risk proneness, as well as health-related variables. An intriguing interaction
effect between OXTR and impulsivity on LTL revealed that the OXTR rs53576 G allele, often
associated with beneficial social traits, significantly mitigates the negative impact of impulsivity
on cellular aging. The current results contribute to understanding the relationship between impulsivity and cellular aging, and demonstrate for the first time that an OXTR polymorphism has
a buffering effect on accelerated cellular aging in female consumers who make impulsive choices.
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