Baohong Sun is a Chinese economist and an academic. She is a Dean’s Distinguished Chair Professor of Marketing at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. Her research has focused on quantitative marketing, consumer decision-making, dynamic and structural modeling, AI and recommendation systems, digital platforms, pricing, personalization, and technology-driven customer behavior. Her work has received media coverage in outlets such as The Guardian, China Daily, Forbes and The New York Times.
Education Sun completed her B.A. from Renmin University of China and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Southern California.
Career Sun began her academic career in 1997 as an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Carnegie Mellon University. She was promoted to Associate Professor of Marketing at Carnegie Mellon University from 2004 to 2009 and then worked as a Full Professor of Marketing from 2009 to 2011, during which time she also held the Carnegie Bosch Professorship. Since 2011, she has been a Dean’s Distinguished Chair Professor of Marketing and the Director of the Web3xAI Research Center at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business.
Sun also holds professional experience, including contributing to the World Economic Forum. Additionally, she was also on the Board of Directors at the Chinese Economic Society.
Works In 2016, Sun authored the book Customer-Centric Marketing: A Pragmatic Framework wherein she explained how to use advanced analytics and optimization to make dynamic, data-driven, customer-centric marketing decisions that adapt over time to maximize long-term profitability. Her recent book, titled Brand Intelligence: Navigating the Transformation in the AI and Web3 Era has explained how brands transform into intelligent, AI-driven digital ecosystems that grow through data, communities, and decentralized value creation.
Research Sun's research has explored economics and quantitative marketing. Her work has focused on developing dynamic structural models. A major theme in her research is analyzing rational and strategic consumer behavior, especially in environments where decisions unfold sequentially and are influenced by prices, promotions, and information.
A large portion of Sun's research focuses on data-driven and model-based marketing, including customer relationship management, pricing strategy, loyalty programs, and cross-selling. She has studied how firms can optimally allocate marketing resources and design incentives by modeling how consumers respond dynamically to marketing actions such as promotions, subscription pricing, and recommendation systems. Her work often uses rigorous econometric and structural approaches to quantify how marketing interventions affect both short-term purchases and long-term customer value.
More recently, Sun's research has expanded into digital platforms and emerging technologies, including e-commerce, social commerce, machine learning, and AI-driven marketing systems. She has examined how consumer behavior evolves in online environments, how recommendation systems influence exploration and purchase decisions, and how firms can use big data to improve targeting and personalization.
Selected articles Erdem, T., & Sun, B. (2002). An empirical investigation of the spillover effects of advertising and sales promotions in umbrella branding. Journal of Marketing Research, 39(4), 408-420. Li, S., Sun, B., & Wilcox, R. T. (2005). Cross-selling sequentially ordered products: An application to consumer banking services. Journal of Marketing Research, 42(2), 233-239. Erdem, T., Keane, M. P., & Sun, B. (2008). A dynamic model of brand choice when price and advertising signal product quality. Marketing Science, 27(6), 1111-1125. Ma, L., Sun, B., & Kekre, S. (2015). The squeaky wheel gets the grease—An empirical analysis of customer voice and firm intervention on Twitter. Marketing Science, 34(5), 627-645. Ma, L., & Sun, B. (2020). Machine learning and AI in marketing–Connecting computing power to human insights. International journal of research in marketing, 37(3), 481-504.
References