Yixing Chen receives award for responsible research in marketing

The University of Notre Dame’s Yixing Chen, assistant professor of marketing at the Mendoza College of Business, has been named a Distinguished Winner of the American Marketing Association’s Award for Responsible Research in Marketing.

The goal of the AMA-EBSCO-RRBM Award for Responsible Research in Marketing is to recognize published research in marketing that produces both useful and credible knowledge. The award is given to researchers who have used reliable and valid data to address an important social challenge while providing meaningful implications for informing policies and practices. Chen and his co-authors Vikas Mittal, the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University, and Shrihari Sridhar, professor of marketing, Joe Foster ‘56 Chair in Business Leadership, and senior associate dean at the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University, received the award for their study “Investigating the Academic Performance and Disciplinary Consequences of School District Internet Access Spending” published in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2021. The study answered three questions: First, does school internet access improve learning outcomes? Second, are there any negative consequences of school internet access? Third, is there synergy between home internet access and school internet access? The authors assembled a unique data set spanning 15 years of internet access spending of 1,243 school districts combined with academic performance and disciplinary records of more than 9,000 Texas public schools, and county-level household broadband internet connectivity. The researchers found that a one-standard-deviation increase in annual internet access spending (approximately $600,000) produces the life-time financial gain of $0.8 million to $1.8 million (because of students’ higher future income potential) and disciplinary losses of $25,800 to $53,440 (due to funding losses induced by lower average daily attendance rates, administrative costs, and operations costs for alternative education programs). Moreover, these consequences are enhanced among schools in the areas where home internet access is high. The paper has been named one of two Distinguished Winners of the AMA-EBSCO-RRBM Award for Responsible Research in Marketing for 2023. More than 40 papers published between 2018–2022 were nominated for the award. The same paper was previously recognized as a finalist for the American Marketing Association’s 2021 Paul E. Green Award. Chen was previously recognized as a finalist for the 2022 AMA-EBSCO-RRBM Award for Responsible Research in Marketing for his paper “Improving Cancer Outreach Effectiveness Through Targeting and Economic Assessments: Insights from a Randomized Field Experiment” published in the Journal of Marketing Research. That same paper was also awarded the Financial Times’ Responsible Business Education Academic Research Award in 2022.