On December 16, 2025, the 19th session of the 2025 Young Scientists Forum Series was successfully held at Room A205 of Mingli Building, hosted by Professor Chen Xingyu, Vice Dean of Shenzhen University’s College of Management. Professor Zhu Yi from the University of Minnesota, USA, was invited to deliver an academic lecture themed "Search Prominence among E-Commerce Platforms", with over 80 faculty and students participating both online and offline.
Professor Zhu Yi has long focused on the application of industrial organization models in marketing, online auctions, consumer search and other fields, devoting to the research on e-commerce platform competition and consumer behavior, especially focusing on issues related to China's economy. His research achievements have been published in top international academic journals such as Marketing Science, Management Science and Journal of Marketing Research, and reported by authoritative media including Harvard Business Review and Forbes. He has won important academic honors such as the John D.C. Little Award and the Morrison Long-Term Impact Award, and currently serves as Associate Editor of Marketing Science and a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Marketing Research, enjoying extensive influence in the academic field.
Centering on the market impact of platform salience, Professor Zhu’s lecture proposed the core research question of how platform salience affects competition and welfare between buyers and sellers against the industry background that online marketplaces account for more than 54% of global e-commerce and in response to platform monopoly disputes. Through constructing comparative models of symmetric and salient platforms and combining empirical analysis of cross-platform browsing data, he revealed that platform salience intensifies intra-platform seller competition while weakening inter-platform competition—non-salient platforms may increase sales accordingly, while prominent platforms may suffer from the "salience curse" leading to declining sales, with room for improvement in consumer surplus. The lecture also proposed empirical antitrust testing methods, providing important references for market regulation.
The interactive session was lively, where faculty and students raised in-depth questions such as "how platforms avoid the salience curse", "the compliance of cross-platform data collection" and "strategies for small and medium-sized sellers to cope with platform competition", which Professor Zhu responded to in detail one by one combining research models and industry cases. Vice Dean Chen Xingyu summarized that the lecture focused on industry pain points, analyzed the economic effects of platform salience with rigorous theoretical models and detailed empirical data, broke traditional perceptions, provided a new perspective for platform governance and corporate decision-making in the digital economy era, and had important guiding significance for academic research and practical application in related fields.
The Young Scientists Forum has continuously set up "distinguished scholar sessions" and "young faculty sessions", aiming to build a dialogue bridge between faculty and students of the College of Management and cutting-edge researchers. This event attracted participants with interdisciplinary backgrounds including marketing, business administration, data science and economics, both senior scholars specializing in quantitative research and young teachers focusing on digital market research, fully demonstrating the strong atmosphere of interdisciplinary exchange in the school. The forum will continue to focus on the intersection of digital economy and market governance, stimulate scientific research innovation through regular academic activities, and help the school improve talent training and academic influence.
