Wei Miao

Wei Miao

Assistant Professor of Marketing

UCL School of Management

Biography

Welcome to my homepage! I’m an Assistant Professor of Marketing and Analytics at UCL School of Management. I study sharing economy, platform design, and industrial organization using causal machine learning, structural modeling, and field experiment methods. My current research revolves around the design of pricing schemes (such as surge pricing and flat-rate pricing) and dispatch systems in ride-sharing markets. I also study platform design, including information provision on platform landing pages, platform disintermediation, and platform certification.

View my CV here.

Interests
  • Sharing Economy
  • Platform Design
  • Digital Marketing
  • Empirical IO
Education
  • Ph.D. in Quantitative Marketing, 2019

    National University of Singapore, Singapore

  • B.Econ. in Finance, 2014

    Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Working Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Assistant Professor of Marketing
Aug 2020 – Present London, UK

Selected Ongoing Research

*

A Rising Tide that Lifts All Boats: The Effects of Collective Recognition Programs on E-Commerce Sellers and Regional Economic Development

Alibaba’s Taobao platform launched a unique Taobao Town Certification (TTC) program in 2014 to recognize all sellers in a rural town collectively when their total sales volume exceeded a certain threshold. Unlike other platform certifications that often promote popular products or top-rated sellers individually, TTC is a unique “collective” strategy that endorses all sellers in a specific town “collectively.” In this paper, we examine the causal effects of this collective promotion program on sellers’ business performance and other social issues such as regional economic disparities and inclusive economic development.

Fighting for My Idols: The Value of Gamified Voting System on Social Media Platforms

In this research, we collaborated with Asia’s largest microblogging platform to explore strategies that can effectively stimulate user engagement. Drawing upon the media system dependency theory and social comparison theory, we designed and implemented a large-scale field experiment on the platform, in which we introduced a gamified voting system into the Communities, enabling users to advocate for their idols and compete on a public leaderboard.

Measuring Seller Response to Buyer-initiated Disintermediation: Evidence from a Field Experiment on a Service Platform

Despite the booming of platform businesses, disintermediation has become a severe issue facing many platforms. In this research, we design and analyze an undercover randomized field experiment to investigate how sellers respond to disintermediation requests initiated by buyers.

Friend or Foe? Flat-Rate Pricing and Supply Outcomes in the Ride-Hailing Market

This study takes advantage of an exogenous policy change in which a leading taxi company in Singapore introduced an origin-destination-based flat-fare option to causally evaluate the causal effects of flat-rate pricing the ride-hailing market.

Teaching

UCL School of Management, University College London

Miscellaneous

My hobbies include

Contact

  • wei.miao@ucl.ac.uk
  • Level 38, One Canada Square, London, England E14 5AA
  • The UCL School of Management is based on the 38th floor of One Canada Square in Canary Wharf.