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 in Economics and Mathematics 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.
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.
Publication
Does Premium Version Adoption in mHealth Improve User Engagement and Health-Related Outcomes?, with Kosuke Uetake and Nathan Yang. (Forthcoming at Marketing Science, Article in Advance)
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As Lead Author
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Best Student Paper Award at the 15th Annual Conference on Health IT and Analytics (CHITA) 2025
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Freemium upgrade is a primary monetization lever for mHealth apps, yet whether paying for premium features actually sustains user engagement remains an open question. We study this question using large-scale data from a fitness-tracking mobile app with a staggered difference-in-differences design. Premium adoption generates an immediate increase in food and exercise tracking, caloric budget adherence, and exercise calories, but these effects attenuate within several weeks and do not translate into sustained weight loss. Sensitivity analysis and matched-sample designs confirm that the engagement responses are not solely driven by time-varying selection. Heterogeneous engagement lifts by pre-upgrade exposure are more consistent with hedonic decline than with sunk-cost effects or motivational mean reversion: users with limited prior exposure to the free version exhibit substantially larger post-upgrade engagement lifts than those who have already interacted extensively with it. We further demonstrate that failing to account for endogeneity and selection in premium adoption leads to a substantial overstatement of its effects on both engagement and health outcomes.
Selected Working Papers
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Solo-authored, as JMP earlier
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User-generated content is crucial to online content platforms, yet how platforms can effectively encourage users' contributions remains unclear. This paper examines the roles of peer recognition and platform rewards in motivating user contributions. I design and implement a large-scale field experiment involving 12,182 users on a leading online question-and-answer platform, in which an experimental increase in reputation shifts users' attainability of both. The treatment corresponds to a 19.6% increase in the sampled users’ median reputation. I find that the treatment significantly increases the proportion of contributing users by around 15%. The treatment effect emerges quickly within the first few weeks but shows limited long-term impact. The effect is larger for users close to earning their next platform reward and is concentrated among low- to medium-experience users. The effort and quality of subsequent answers remain stable. To examine the roles of the two incentives, I estimate a structural model of contribution decisions and find that users value both additional peer recognition and platform rewards. Finally, I leverage a large language model (LLM) to assess the quality of approximately 200,000 historical answers from sampled users. Structural simulation with LLM-based quality assessments indicates that the undervaluation of new users’ high-quality contributions substantially discourages participation, and that peer recognition and platform rewards together can substantially encourage contributions. Together, these findings provide the first experimental measurement of the effectiveness of both peer recognition and platform rewards, integrate structural and experimental evidence, and inform the scalable design of non-monetary incentives on digital platforms.
Victim of Your (Customer's) Own Success, with Nathan Yang. (Reject & Resubmit at Journal of Marketing Research)
Ongoing Projects
Several, Available Upon Request