Song Yao

Professor of Marketing

Song Yao

Song Yao

Song Yao is a Professor of Marketing at the Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis. He also serves as an Amazon Scholar and is a former Principal Economist at Amazon’s Stores Economics and Science group (SEAS, formerly Core AI). Yao’s research lies at the intersection of economics and marketing, with key interests in advertising, pricing, retailing, and platforms. His work applies methods from empirical industrial organization, econometrics, and machine learning.
Yao has received numerous accolades, including the Paul Green Best Paper Award (2012), the John Howard Dissertation Award (2009), and the AMA-EBSCO-RRBM Award (2023), all sponsored by the American Marketing Association. He was a finalist for the INFORMS Frank Bass Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2011 and 2012, the John Little Best Paper Award in 2009 and 2011, the Long Term Impact Award in 2017, the Dick Wittink Prize in 2018, and the Paul Green Best Paper Award in 2021. He was selected by the Marketing Science Institute as an MSI Young Scholar in 2017 and an MSI Scholar in 2022.
Before joining Olin, Yao taught courses on "Digital/Internet Marketing," "Customer Analytics," and "Marketing Management" at the University of Minnesota (Carlson), Northwestern University (Kellogg), and Duke University (Fuqua).

Area of Expertise

Economics, Information Technology, Statistics/Econometrics, Advertising, Consumer Products Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Management and Strategy, Marketing Research, Pricing

Education

  • Ph D 2009, Duke University
  • MA 2004, University of California, Los Angeles
  • C.Phil 2003, University of California, Los Angeles
  • BA 1999, Renmin University of China

Academic/Professional Activities

  • Editorial Review Board Member, International Journal of Marketing Research
  • Editor, Associate Editor, Quantitative Marketing and Economics
  • Editor, Associate Editor, Marketing Science
  • Editorial Review Board Member, Journal of Marketing Research

Research Interests

Quantitative Marketing, Empirical Microeconomics, Advertising, New Technology, Auctions, Competitive Strategy, Customer Analytics

Selected Publications

  • "The Impact of Soda Taxes: Pass-through, Tax Avoidance, and Nutritional Effects", Journal of Marketing Research, with Stephan Seiler, Anna Tuchman, 2021
  • "Risk Transfer versus Cost Reduction on Two-Sided Microfinance Platforms", Quantitative Marketing and Economics, Issue 3, 251-287, with Bryan Bollinger, 2018
  • "The Impact of Governmental Interventions on COVID-19 Spread and Consumer Spending", Management Science, Issue 5, 3302-3318, with Nan Zhao, Raphael Thomadsen, Chong Bo (Zack) Wang, 2024
  • "Does Online Word-of-Mouth Increase Demand? (and How?) Evidence from a Natural Experiment", Marketing Science, Issue 6, 838-861, with Stephan Seiler, Wenbo Wang, 2017
  • "The Design and Targeting of Compliance Promotions", with Øystein Daljord, Carl Mela, Jason Roos, Jim Sprigg
  • "The Impact of Advertising along the Conversion Funnel", Quantitive Marketing and Economics, Issue 3, 241-278, with Stephan Seiler, 2017
  • "The Impact of a Supreme Court Decision on the Preferences of Americans Regarding Abortion Policy", Management Science, Issue 9, 5405-5417, with Raphael Thomadsen, Robert Zeithammer, 2023
  • "TV Channel Search and Commercial Breaks", Journal of Marketing Research, Issue 5, 671-686, with Wenbo Wang, Yuxin Chen, 2017
  • "Forecasting the Spread of COVID-19 under Different Reopening Strategies", with Meng Liu, Raphael Thomadsen, 2020
  • "Sequential Search with Refinement: Model and Application with Click-stream Data", Management Science, Issue 12, 4345-4365, with Yuxin Chen, 2017

Contact

Song Yao