Wei Miao

Wei Miao

Assistant Professor of Marketing

UCL School of Management

Biography

Welcome to my homepage! I’m an Assistant Professor of Marketing at UCL School of Management. I study substantive issues in the area of 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 various pricing schemes (such as surge pricing and flat-rate pricing) and dispatch systems in ride-sharing markets. I also study platform design related matters, such as optimizing information provision on landing pages and mitigating platform disintermediation.

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
School of Management, University College London
Aug 2020 – Present London, UK

Publications

Wei Miao, Yiting Deng, Wei Wang, Yongdong Liu, Christopher Tang (2022). The Effects of Surge Pricing on Driver Behavior in the Ride-Sharing Market: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment. Journal of Operations Management.

PDF DOI UCLA Anderson Review (media coverage) South China Morning Post (media coverage)

Wei Wang, Wei Miao, Yongdong Liu, Yiting Deng, Yunfei Cao (2022). The Impact of COVID-19 on the Ride-Sharing Industry and Its Recovery: Causal Evidence from China. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice.

DOI

Selected Ongoing Research

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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.

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

To reduce the income gap between urban and rural China, Alibaba’s Taobao platform launched a unique Taobao Town Certification (TTC) program in 2014 to recognize e-commerce sellers “collectively” in a particular rural town in China for reaching a critical mass. Unlike other platform certifications that promote popular products or top-rated sellers, TTC is a unique “collective” promotion strategy that advocates all sellers in a specific town collectively. In this paper, we examine the causal effects of this collective promotion program TTC on sellers’ business performance.

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

Qualifications

Certified Financial Risk Manager
Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) Feb 2017
See certificate

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.