PhD Oral Exam - Shaojia Wang, Economics

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This dissertation comprises three chapters on digital economics, examining how digital platforms—both public and private—reshape markets, consumer behaviour, and economic welfare in the digital era. The first chapter investigates the role of a government-initiated e-commerce platform (GEP) in transforming the sales of a traditional agricultural specialty in China’s Pu’er tea market. Drawing on a unique dataset from field experiments and surveys of 983 farmers, it identifies significant substitution effects from offline to online sales, highlighting how the GEP’s bundled public services, such as cooperative packaging, regional branding, and logistics coordination, facilitate farmers’ digital participation and market expansion. The second chapter explores the renewal behaviour of digital content memberships on a Chinese creator platform, employing a reduced-form empirical analysis to quantify the impacts of price adjustments and peer influence within complex referral networks. The findings reveal that referee-targeted discounts are the most effective strategy for promoting renewals while minimizing revenue loss. Building on this evidence, the third chapter develops a structural model that endogenizes the formation of referral networks and captures users’ interdependent renewal decisions, enabling counterfactual simulations of alternative pricing and referral strategies. Collectively, these chapters advance our understanding of how digitalization transforms both producer and consumer behaviour, offering theoretical and empirical insights for platform governance, public digital initiatives, and policy interventions that aim to foster inclusive, efficient, and sustainable digital economic development.