Kai Zhu
Marketing
Biography
Kai Zhu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Marketing at Bocconi University. He holds a PhD in Information Systems from Boston University.
His research broadly explores how digital technologies transform markets, media, politics, and society. He is especially interested in the digital transformation of cultural markets—such as news, books, movies, and music—using computational tools like machine learning, natural language processing, causal inference, and network analysis to analyze large-scale structured and unstructured data to uncover human behavior and systemic dynamics.
At Bocconi, he teaches courses including Data Mining for Marketing, Business, and Society and Large Language Models for Market Research.
Among his selected publications are works on content growth and attention dynamics in information networks, media narratives in crises, and peer feedback effects on platform user content.
Latest publications
Monetizing Platforms: An Empirical Analysis of Supply and Demand Responses to Entry Costs in Two-Sided Markets
Management Science, 2025
Negative Peer Feedback and User Content Generation: Evidence From a Restaurant Review Platform
Production and Operations Management, 2024
If a Tree Falls in the Forest: Presidential Press Conferences and Early Media Narratives about the COVID-19 Crisis
Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 2022, vol.2, pp.1-72
Content Growth and Attention Contagion in Information Networks: Addressing Information Poverty on Wikipedia
Information Systems Research, 2020, vol.31, no. 2, pp.491-509
Attribute reduction approaches for general relation decision systems
Pattern Recognition Letters, 2015, vol.65, pp.81-87
The relationship among three types of rough approximation pairs
Knowledge-Based Systems, 2014, vol.60, pp.28-34