Principal Researcher Sijin Chen

BACKGROUND

Sijin is a Principal Researcher working with Ayelet Fishbach. She was a visiting scholar at the Booth School of Business in 2024, and received her Ph.D. in Marketing from the National University of Singapore. Prior to that, she completed her Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration at the National University of Singapore.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Sijin is a consumer behavior researcher interested in understanding marketing problems through the lens of judgment and decision-making and social psychology. She works on three interconnected topics:

1. Motivation and goals. How do consumers’ motivations differ in the marketplace, and what are the downstream consequences? For instance, are consumers more motivated to convey accurate information about product quality when penning a negative than a positive review? If so, reading negative reviews is more informative than reading positive ones when trying to predict product success.

2. Evaluations of new technologies. How do people perceive AI making moral tradeoffs, and relatedly, are there cost-efficient ways to improve their evaluations of the AI? For example,  consumers evaluate an AI that slows down when making moral tradeoffs more favorably than ones that do not.

3. Cultural psychology of everyday products. How do cultural products (e.g., movie) evolve across time and societies? Are movies from different countries becoming more similar?

Methodologically, she integrates experimental approaches with computational tools, including natural language processing and large language models, to analyze large-scale textual data. She has used these methods to quantify the precision of online reviews and to map cultural convergence/divergence in film narratives.