About

Ying Bao is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, affiliated with the Gies College of Business. She holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Toronto at Rotman School of Management, an M.A. in Economics from the University of Toronto, and a B.Sc. in Economics from the same institution. Her research focuses on digital marketing, consumer well-being, behavioral economics, (in)attention, contract design, food consumption, and technology adoption. Bao has contributed to understanding consumer behavior through various empirical investigations, including the effects of quality disclosure on firm dynamics, consumer price sensitivity, and the impact of consumption tracking technology. She has presented her work at numerous academic conferences and seminars and has received research grants supporting her investigations into reputation effects, product uncertainty, and mobile phone addiction. Bao is actively involved in teaching courses related to marketing research and consumer analytics, emphasizing the application of machine learning algorithms and software tools such as R and Python in marketing contexts.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Microeconomics
• Business
• Economics
• Industrial organization
• Acoustics
• Advertising
• Materials science
• Optics
• Commerce
• Mechanics
• Physics
• Marketing

Selected publications

• Ultrasonic speckle tracking blood flow velocimetry based on the moth-flame optimization

  2024

  • Materials science
  • Acoustics
  • Optics

  Atherosclerosis is a main cause of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. Blood flow velocity profile (BFVP) is usually used as an important hemodynamic index for the course of atherosclerosis. Ultrasonic speckle tracking (ST) has been widely used in the estimation of blood flow velocity profile. To solve the problem of long time-consuming and low accuracy of the conventional ST with a global search (ST-GS), an improved ST method based on the Moth-Flame optimization (ST-MFO) is proposed. Based on the Field II (namely, an ultrasound simulator), the performance of the STMFO algorithm has been evaluated, and experimental results have been compared with those of the ST-GS. The ST-MFO method reduces the NRMSE of the BFVP measurements by 17.44% on average and the running time by 18.79% on average. It indicates that MFO method can improve the accuracy and efficiency of BFVP measurement, which is of great significance to the prevention and course monitoring of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases.

  DOI

• Designing Product Development Contracts in the Presence of Managerial Lobbying

  Management Science · 2022 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Industrial organization

  We examine a firm’s contract design problem in the context of allocating resources to new products with uncertain potential being developed by the managers vying for funds. The firm faces twin problems of identifying the right project(s) to prioritize them, and next also motivate the managers to exert effort in implementing the project to successful fruition. The firm’s contract design can incentivize the managers either using a resource-based incentive plan, which offers a reward based on the number of resources invested in the projects, or offering a resource-decoupled incentive plan, which provides a standard reward disregarding the differential amount of resources invested. We consider a set-up where the manager has private information about project quality. During the prioritizing first stage, we allow the manager to lobby for the project by manipulating the signal of the project quality. We show that a resource-decoupled incentive plan impacts the lobbying by encouraging the manager of the higher quality project to manipulate the quality signal more to stand out. Therefore, although a resource-based incentive plan is more efficient in inducing the manager in exerting implementation effort, a resource-decoupled incentive plan may be preferred as it leads to more accurate resource allocation. Thus, allowing lobbying that involves exaggeration may be beneficial by amplifying a firm’s ability to identify high caliber projects. We demonstrate the robustness of our results in models where the firm chooses the level of evaluation threshold, where there are multiple projects, and where the project evaluations involve a ranking procedure. This paper was accepted by Duncan Simester, marketing.

  DOI

• Leveraging visual cues and pricing strategies: An empirical investigation of the pre-owned luxury market

  Journal of Global Fashion Marketing · 2022 · 15 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Marketing

  Previously less notable behind the primary market, the pre-owned luxury market has grown rapidly during the past five years as luxury resale has become a new normal. This market presents some new challenges that do not apply to the traditional luxury market, yet limited research explores it. This paper fills this gap by investigating information disclosure and pricing effects in pre-owned luxury product promotion in the digital market. Analysis of a unique dataset from a leading luxury resale online platform suggests that providing more information through visual cues reduces information asymmetry and facilitates transactions, but the effect is moderated if pre-owned products are in newer conditions. High prices also have an overall negative effect on sales, but the effect is moderated among newer products because they provide higher price-prestige value. Managerial implications to sellers and the platform are discussed.

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mengze Shi

  6 shared

• Ajay Kalra

  Southern Illinois University Carbondale

  2 shared

• Edward C. Jaenicke

  2 shared

• Bingbing He

  Yunnan University

  1 shared

• Emily Yucai Wang

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  1 shared

• Amir Fazli

  Indiana University

  1 shared

• Matthew Osborne

  1 shared

• Alex Yao

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Campus Research Board Research Grant, University of Illinois…
• Junior Faculty Grant, Gies College of Business (2021-2022, 2…
• The Effects of Reputation and Product Uncertainty on Adoptio…
• Alleviating Mobile Phone Addiction Through Goal Design, Gies…

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