XIAN GU. University of Maryland Mobile: Suite 3330 Van Munching Hall College Park, MD 20742

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1 XIAN GU University of Maryland Mobile: Suite 3330 Van Munching Hall College Park, MD EDUCATION Ph.D. in Marketing 2019 (expected) Specialization in Quantitative Marketing; Minor in Economics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD M.A. Economics 2014 Doctoral Coursework in Economics and Doctoral Comprehensive Exams Passed Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY Bachelor of Economics 2012 Peking University, Beijing, China RESEARCH INTERESTS Substantive: Mobile Marketing, Omnichannel Marketing, Multi-devices Marketing Methodological: Treatment Effect, Field Experiment, Structural Model, Machine Learning DISSERTATION Title: Committee: Marketing in Mobile, Omni-channel and Multi-Format Contexts P. K. Kannan (chair), Liye Ma (co-chair), Michel Wedel, David Godes, Guido Kuersteiner PUBLICATION Gu, Xian, P. K. Kannan and Liye Ma, Selling the Premium in Freemium, forthcoming at Journal of Marketing MANUSCRIPTS UNDER REVIEW Gu, Xian and P. K. Kannan, The Dark Side of Mobile App Adoption: Examining the Impact on Customers Multichannel Purchase, Under preparation for 2 nd round review at Journal of Marketing Research

2 SELECTED RESEARCH IN PROGRESS A Structural Model of Mobile App Adoption and Multichannel Choice of Purchase, with Liye Ma and P. K. Kannan Marketing Applications of Generalized Transfer Entropy Metrics, with P. K. Kannan and Vithala R. Rao Optimal Pricing Strategy with Mobile-Assisted Shopping, with David Godes and Yogesh Joshi Identifying the Competitors in the Market: A Spatial Approach, with P. K. Kannan HONORS & AWARDS AMA Sheth Doctoral Consortium Fellow (2018) Haring Symposium Fellow (2018) Winner, Shankar-Spiegel Best Dissertation Proposal Award (2017) Robert Mittelstaedt Doctoral Symposium Fellow (2017) INFORMS Marketing Science Doctoral Consortium Fellow (2016) CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS A Structural Model of Mobile App Adoption and Multichannel Choice of Purchase INFORMS Marketing Science Conference, Philadelphia, PA (June 2018) The Dark Side of Customer Mobile App Adoption: Examining the Impact on Their Multichannel Purchase Robert Mittelstaedt Doctoral Symposium, Lincoln, NE (March 2017) AMA Winter Academic Conference, Orlando, FL (February 2017) INFORMS Marketing Science Conference, Shanghai, China (June 2016) Selling the Premium in Freemium Haring Symposium, Bloomington, IN (April 2018) INFORMS Marketing Science Conference, Los Angeles, CA (June 2017) Marketing Applications of Generalized Transfer Entropy Metrics Marketing Dynamics Conference, Hong Kong, China (August 2017) Advanced Research Techniques (ART) Forum, San Diego, CA (June 2015)

3 TEACHING EXPERIENCE Instructor, Marketing Research Methods (Undergraduate Core), University of Maryland,, Spring 2017 (Overall Rating: 3.1 out of 4.0) COMPUTER SKILLS R, MATLAB, STATA, C, EViews, SPSS, LaTeX DOCTORAL COURSEWORK Marketing Marketing Models Marketing Models with MCMC Structural Models Analytical Models Marketing Strategy Consumer Behavior P. K. Kannan Michel Wedel Tao Chen David Godes Roland Rust Amna Kirmani Economics Computational Economics Econometrics II Econometrics IV Theories of Industrial Organization Empirical Studies in Industrial Organization Empirical Microeconomics Microeconomics I Microeconomics II Macroeconomics I Macroeconomics II Econometrics Applied Econometrics Industrial Organization I Industrial Organization II Game Theory I Game Theory II Mathematical Statistics Andrew Sweeting Guido Kuersteiner, Ingmar Prucha Guido Kuersteiner, Ingmar Prucha Daniel Vincent Ginger Jin Raymond Guiteras Sandro Brusco Pradeep Dubey Alexis Anagnostopoulos Eva Carceles-Poveda Mark R. Montgomery Mark R. Montgomery Sandro Brusco Yiyi Zhou Yair Tauman Pradeep Dubey Jiaqiao Hu

4 REFERENCES P. K. Kannan (chair) Liye Ma (co-chair) Dean s Chair in Marketing Science Associate Professor University of Maryland University of Maryland 3445 Van Munching Hall 3323 Van Munching Hall College Park, MD College Park, MD pkannan@rhsmith.umd.edu liyema@rhsmith.umd.edu Phone: (301) Phone: (301) Michel Wedel Distinguished University Professor and PepsiCo Chair in Consumer Science University of Maryland 3303 Van Munching Hall College Park, MD mwedel@rhsmith.umd.edu Phone: (301)

5 RESEARCH ABSTRACTS Selling the Premium in Freemium with P. K. Kannan and Liye Ma (Forthcoming at Journal of Marketing) The success of a freemium model depends on the number of customers purchasing the premium version in the presence of the free version. We investigate the strategy of extending the product line by providing an additional premium version as a means to spur demand for the existing premium version. We highlight how extending the results of the standard product line model is insufficient in such cases due to the conceptual nuances that the presence of the free version introduces in a freemium context. We conduct a randomized field experiment with an online content provider, the National Academies Press, which offers book titles in a PDF version for free and sells the paperback version for a premium. Overall, we show that paperback titles accompanied by an additional premium format, either an ebook or a hardcover version, have higher sales than those in the control condition. The positive impact on paperback sales is stronger for titles that are more popular or lower in price, and the effect of introducing the ebook version is higher when the ebook price is closer to the paperback price. By analyzing customer choices at the individual level, we identify the existence of the compromise effect and the attraction effect in the extended product line setting, a significant contribution not only in the freemium context but also to the product line literature. The Dark Side of Mobile App Adoption: Examining the Impact on Customers Multichannel Purchase with P. K. Kannan (Invited for 2 nd round review at Journal of Marketing Research) Increasingly firms are using mobile applications to engage with customers, provide services, and encourage customer spending. Conventional wisdom indicates that apps have a positive impact on customer spending. We critically examine this premise by estimating the impact of app adoption on customers' omni-channel spending in the context of a hotel chain and identifying the factors contributing to such impact. Exploiting the variation in the customers' timing of app adoption and the difference-in-differences approach, we find that app adoption has a significant negative impact on total customer spending. This negative effect is robust to controlling for customer self-selection bias, measuring effects across alternative time frames, customer spending patterns and app usage behaviors, using different measures of purchase and alternative model specifications, and using different random samples. A survey of app adopters reveals that customers who adopt the focal app are also most likely to adopt competitors' apps, and therefore are likely to search more and

6 shop around, leading to a decreased share of wallet with the firm. Our analysis also reveals that the negative impact on spending is lower for those customers who use the apps for mobile check-in than those who use the apps for just searching. By encouraging customers to engage with the full functionality of the app, firms can possibly mitigate the negative impact. A Structural Model of Mobile App Adoption and Multichannel Choice of Purchase with Liye Ma and P. K. Kannan Consumers' multi-channel shopping is a widely observed phenomenon. From a firm's perspective, understanding consumers' channel choice and purchase decision is critical for their revenue. Furthermore, mobile applications (apps) have become a popular shopping channel for firms to engage with customers, provide services, and impact customer spending and loyalty. Therefore, another key question to answer is how the introduction of this new channel (i.e., mobile apps) impacts consumer cross-channel shopping behavior. Using data from a leading hospitality firm covering a four-year period, we develop an integrated dynamic structural model to investigate consumers' decision to adopt mobile applications, and its subsequent impacts on their decisions to purchase using alternative shopping channels. With counterfactuals we examine the impact of a firm's decision not to introduce an app and the availability of app services on customer spending. Marketing Applications of Generalized Transfer Entropy Metrics with P. K. Kannan and Vithala R. Rao This research introduces the generalized transfer entropy (GTE) methodology to provide a fast and useful solution for analyzing a large volume of multi-channel marketing data at the individual level in a long-time horizon. The results from this work can assess the incremental contribution from each marketing channel in leading to conversions. While many methodologies have been proposed in recent times in marketing literature for analyzing path data, most of them follow a parametric framework and make assumptions about the underlying relationship with different model structures. In addition, these parametric approaches also require significant time on model estimation with limited sample size. In contrast, the GTE methodology is fast and can provide useful, satisfying solutions using all available data in near real time. We applied GTE to two real click-stream data sets: multichannel attribution and customer paths across multiple firms in the travel industry. In the first application, we focused on how best to design effective media-mix and channel-mix strategies by properly attributing conversions/sales occurring in different online and offline channels. In the second application, we used GTE measures to investigate the customer path across different hotel brands and travel websites, and thus shed some light on whether travel websites take away or bring in customers of a hotel brand.