Mengxia Zhang

Mengxia Zhang studies how major societal shifts — the rise of artificial intelligence, visual media, virtual technology, and the creator economy — reshape consumer behavior and market outcomes. Her research program offers rigorous, data-driven frameworks for understanding how these forces create new winners and losers in markets, with implications for platform designers, brand managers, and policymakers navigating an era of rapid technological change.

An Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Ivey Business School, Western University, Zhang deploys machine learning, causal inference, and field experiments to answer questions at the frontier of marketing and society. Her work has been featured in Business Insider, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, Phys.org, and USC News, among others. Her research appears in Management Science and Production and Operations Management, spanning topics from AI-human co-creation and generative AI's effects on user communities, to the real economics of virtual tours and knowledge-sharing platform dynamics. Her Management Science paper — showing that consumer-posted photos predict restaurant survival beyond reviews and all known financial signals — is among the most-cited empirical studies of its cohort in quantitative marketing. The paper also won the ISMS Doctoral Proposal Competition Award and the Shankar-Spiegel Award Runner-up.

Zhang holds a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California (Outstanding Researcher Award) and is a 2025 ISMS Early Career Scholars Camp Fellow. She serves on the Editorial Review Board of Decision Sciences and reviews for premier journals including Management Science, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, and Information Systems Research, among others. She has been invited to present her research at over 25 institutions across North America, Europe, and Asia — including Washington University in St. Louis, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Penn State, Erasmus University Rotterdam, National University of Singapore, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of Hong Kong, Peking University, and Tsinghua University.

She is actively recruiting part-time research assistants with strong quantitative backgrounds in statistics, econometrics, computer science, or data science.

Curriculum Vita