Juanjuan Zhang

Juanjuan Zhang is the Class of 1948 Career Development Professor and Associate Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Zhang’s primary area of research is observational learning (i.e., learning by observing others’ choices). Her empirical papers investigate observational learning in various markets, including microfinance, social networks, real estate, and organ transplant. Her theoretical papers explore optimal firm strategies to manage consumer observational learning. Zhang also studies the role of market information in firms’ product and pricing decisions. Her recent research emphasizes the cost of learning, investigating concepts such as cognitive simplicity and endogenous preferences.

Zhang received the 2010 Frank M. Bass Award for the best marketing paper derived from a Ph.D. thesis published in INFORMS journals. She is a two-time finalist for the John D. C. Little Award for the best marketing paper published in Marketing Science or Management Science. In 2011, Zhang was named a Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar, a title awarded to “potential leaders of the next generation of marketing academics.”

Zhang holds a BEcon from Tsinghua University and a PhD in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley.