主题：The Emotional Impact of Media Stories on Consumers' Optimal Choices: An Experiment in the Context of High-Information Retail Platforms

报告时间：2025年11月19日（周三）上午10:30—11:30

报告地点：文化中心305会议室

主讲人：山东大学   连暐虹教授

主持人： 浙江财经大学   叶航教授

Abstract：

In China’s dynamic digital economy, as well as in other economies around the world, consumers are often confronted with challenging product comparisons in online purchase platforms, against a backdrop of exposure to emotion-laden media stories. What is the consequence of such emotional-status influences on consumers’ ability to choose products best-fitting their personal needs in a high-information digital platform context? We conduct an incentivized experiment on a general subject population in China, which uses written media stories to induce emotional states of interest: anticipation, elation, anxiety or distress (positive, negative) x (ex-ante, ex-post). Emotional impact is verified using psychological validation methods. Subjects proceed to make a series of choices between pairwise consumer products from popular online shopping platforms with the following incentivized targets: low price, functionality, environmentally friendly, or positively reviewed. The results show that in the pricing domain, elation enhances deal-finding as compared to either anticipation or anxiety. Furthermore, anxiety enhances performance in the functionality-seeking domain, as compared to distress. These effects are robust to demographic and socio-economic control variables. Our study sheds light on the impact of exposure to everyday emotional content such as social media and news stories, on consumers’ information processing and decisions in online shopping platforms.

嘉宾简介：

连暐虹，山东大学经济研究院教授、博士生导师，山东大学特聘教授，山东大学理论与实验经济学研究中心（CREATE）联合主任，清华大学经济科学与政策实验室（ESPEL）创建人之一。此前，担任过清华大学经济管理学院助理教授、香港中文大学助理教授、欧洲大学研究院费尔南·布罗代尔资深学者。担任North American Journal of Economics and Finance等多份国际学术期刊客座编辑与编委成员，担任大陆、香港、台湾、新加坡等政府科研资助机构评审专家，担任多所高校教师晋升外审专家，担任31种期刊匿名评审人，多次获评杰出评审人。研究领域包括行为经济学、实验经济学、应用微观经济学，研究主题涵盖不确定性决策、合作协调、信任互惠、信念偏误、社会偏好等行为问题，擅长采用实验设计与数据分析等研究方法。主持过面上、青年等多项国家自然科学基金项目、教育部科研项目、香港研究资助局项目，结题评“优”，并多次在学术会议上做主旨演讲与专题报告。研究工作发表于Nature Communications、PNAS、American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings)、Games and Economic Behavior、Experimental Economics、Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization等国际知名期刊。