Research Overview

Xiaohang (Flora) Feng is a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, profoundly fortunate and grateful to be advised by Prof. Kannan Srinivasan, and equally appreciative of the long-term mentorship of Prof. Shunyuan Zhang and Prof. Xiao Liu. Her work integrates computer vision, generative AI, and machine learning to solve marketing challenges, leveraging unstructured data, explainable AI, and human experiment. She also explores sustainability, using analytical model, causal inference, and structural model. Her research has been accepted at the Journal of Marketing Research and Journal of Consumer Research, with ongoing work at advanced stage at Marketing Science. She has also authored book chapters on AI in Marketing.

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Job Market Paper

Dynamic Impact and Strategic Optimization of Sustainability Certification on E‑Commerce Platforms

Xiaohang (Flora) Feng, Xiao Liu, Shunyuan Zhang, and Kannan Srinivasan. 2025.

Selected Work

An AI Method to Score Celebrity Visual Potential

  • Xiaohang (Flora) Feng, Shunyuan Zhang, Xiao Liu, Kannan Srinivasan, and Cait Lamberton. 2025.

  • Accepted at Journal of Marketing Research.

Visual Uniqueness in Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces: Machine Learning Model Development, Validation, and Application

  • Xiaohang (Flora) Feng, Charis Li, and Shunyuan Zhang. 2025.

  • Accepted at Journal of Consumer Research.

Sustainability and Competition on Amazon

  • Xiaohang (Flora) Feng, Xiao Liu, Shunyuan Zhang, and Kannan Srinivasan. 2025.

  • Revise & Resubmit at Marketing Science.

Marketing Through the Machine’s Eyes: Image Analytics and Interpretability

  • Xiaohang (Flora) Feng, Shunyuan Zhang, and Kannan Srinivasan. 2023.

  • Chapter at Artificial Intelligence in Marketing.

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A young woman with long black hair, wearing a sleeveless cream-colored dress, a gold necklace with a clover pendant, and a matching bracelet, is posing against a dark blue background, looking at the camera.

Education

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

  • Ph.D. in Marketing (Quantitative), 2020 – 2026 (Expected)

  • M.S. in Machine Learning, 2022 – 2024

  • M.S. in Industrial Administration, 2020 – 2022

Peking University, Beijing, China

  • B.A. in Foreign Languages, 2016 – 2020

  • Minor in Economics, 2017 – 2020

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

  • Exchange Student, 2019