Yi Zhu

Yi Zhu is an Associate Professor of Marketing, Mary & Jim Lawrence Fellow at the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD in Business Administration from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2013. He worked as a consultant at Shanghai Investment Consulting Corporation before he went to Vancouver, where he received his M.A. in Economics from University of British Columbia. His research interests focus on the application of industrial organization models in marketing, online auctions, consumer search, advertising, media slant, sharing economy and Chinese economy. His recent works have appeared or forthcoming at Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing Research and International Journal of Research in Marketing. Beyond academic publications, his research has been discussed in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, CBS, Entrepreneur, Star Tribune,Toronto Star, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Global News Radio among others.  

Zhu is the recipient of the John D.C. Little Award for the best marketing paper published in Marketing Science or Management Science, the finalist for the Frank M. Bass Award for the best marketing paper derived from a Ph.D. thesis published in INFORMS journals, and the finalist for the Don Morrison Long Term Impact Award by ISMS twice (2021, 2022). He has been selected as a 2017 Marketing Science Institute (MSI) Young Scholars, a biennial award given to the most promising scholars in marketing who have distinguished themselves as potential leaders of the next generation of marketing academics, and the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) Scholars in 2022, a biennial award given to "top scholars helping to set the research agenda for the field". His research was funded by 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Grant, the Marketing Science Institute Grant, Net Institute Grant, CIBER dissertation Grant, Carlson Dean's Small Research Grant, and Dean's Research Travel Grant. In 2022, he was awarded "Carlson School Outstanding Teaching Award" for Excellence in Teaching. Zhu was recognized by the Chinese Ministry of Education to be one of the top nine Chinese doctoral students studying abroad for his outstanding academic achievement and research in 2012 —among all graduate students across all subjects. Zhu has also won Shankar-Spiegel Best Dissertation Proposal Award, James S. Ford/Commerce Associates Ph.D. Fellowship and many other awards during his time at USC. Among the 2013 graduates at USC, Zhu was one of the six awardees of the Inaugural USC PhD Achievement Award.