Yikun Jiang
Hello! I am an Assistant Professor in Management Information Systems at the Mitch Daniels School of Business at Purdue University. I completed my Ph.D. in Economics in May 2025 at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to my doctoral studies at Berkeley, I completed my bachelor's degree at McGill University in 2018 and spent one year as a Ph.D. student in Quantitative Marketing at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.
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My research focuses on understanding individuals' decisions on digital platforms to inform platform strategies. I combine the design and implementation of large-scale field experiments, causal inference, structural modeling, machine learning, and the analysis of unstructured data to answer research questions.
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Working Papers
Encouraging Online Knowledge Contributions: Evidence from a Field Experiment.
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In this project, I design and implement a large-scale field experiment on a leading question-and-answer platform, Stack Overflow, where I experimentally vary the recognition among 12,182 contributing individuals. I present the first field experimental evidence in content contribution decisions that quantifies the relative importance of social motivation versus instrumental motivation with a structural model. Using counterfactual simulations, I then explore platform strategies that encourage contributions. Understanding individuals’ content contribution decisions has important managerial implications for various user-generated content platforms.
Does Premium Version Adoption in mHealth Improve User Engagement and Health-Related Outcomes?, with Kosuke Uetake and Nathan Yang. (Under Third Round Review at Marketing Science)
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​Best Student Paper Award at the 15th Annual Conference on Health IT and Analytics (CHITA) 2025
Victim of Your (Customer's) Own Success, with Nathan Yang. (Reject & Resubmit at Journal of Marketing Research)
Ongoing Projects
Several, Available Upon Request