Shan Huang is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong, a Digital Fellow at Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab, and a consultant to Tencent. Before joining HKU in 2021, she spent two and a half wonderful years at ISOM of UW Foster School of Business. She earned her Ph.D. in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management, an MSc from the University of British Columbia, and a BBA from Tsinghua University.

Her research examines technology-enabled marketing strategies and decision making. She integrates large-scale digital experimentation—such as A/B testing and causal inference—with artificial intelligence techniques, including machine learning and large language models (LLMs), to generate insights into digital behaviors and to develop new methodological tools that advance data-driven decision making for emerging social media platforms. Empirically, her work investigates how social media platforms shape advertising effectiveness, social referrals, and content diffusion, using field experiments and computational methods. Methodologically, she develops tools to systematically improve the external validity of digital experiments as a decision-making instrument, helping reduce the gap between in-experiment results and real-world decision quality for both research and industry applications. Her recent papers focus on methods for estimating long-term treatment effects from short-term experiments, considering user-behavior dynamics and sample-characteristic shifts over time. Her work has appeared in Management Science, Marketing Science, and other leading management journals, as well as premier computer science venues such as ACM EC, and has been supported by over HKD 3 million in competitive research grants.

Professor Huang views research, teaching, and practice as deeply interconnected. Since 2015, she has collaborated extensively with Tencent, launching WeChat’s first large-scale A/B test and co-developing its experimentation infrastructure. Her methodological innovations have been adopted by Tencent and ByteDance, directly influencing practice. At HKU, she designed and teaches Digital Experimentation Methods, a course that earned the Faculty Teaching Innovation Award in 2024. She is also co-authoring a forthcoming book with senior industry leaders, documenting China’s experience with experimentation and data-driven decision making for a global audience.

Research Interests

Technology-Enabled Marketing Strategies and Decision-Making
- AI in Marketing Decisions, Causal and Experimentation Methods (e.g., long-term treatment effects in A/B tests), New Social Media Platforms, Social Networks

Publications

Shan Huang*†, Chen Wang*, Yuan Yuan*, Jinglong Zhao* & Jingjing Zhang (industry author) (2025), Estimating Effects of Long- Term Treatments, Management Science, forthcoming
Yifan Yu*, Shan Huang*†, Yuchen Liu, & Yong Tan (2025), Emotions in Online Content Diffusion, Information Systems Research.
Shan Huang† & Song Lin† (2024), Do More "Likes" Lead to More Clicks? Evidence from a Field Experiment on Social Advertising, Journal of Marketing.
Chen Wang, Shan Huang†, & Shichao Han (industry author), Enhancing External Validity of Experiments with Ongoing Sampling, The Twenty-Fifth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'24)
Shan Huang† & Yi Ji, Algorithmic vs. Friend-based Recommendations in Shaping Novel Content Engagement: A Large-scale Field Experiment, The Twenty-Fifth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'24)
Shan Huang*†, Chen Wang*, Yuan Yuan*, Jinglong Zhao* & Jingjing Zhang (industry author) , Estimating Effects of Long- Term Treatments, The Twenty-Fourth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'23)
Shan Huang†, Sinan Aral, Yu Hu & Erik Brynjolfsson (2020). Social Advertising Eﬀectiveness Across Products: A Large-Scale Field Experiment, Marketing Science, 39(6), 1142-1165.
Hailiang Chen†, Yu Hu & Shan Huang (2019). Monetary Incentive and Stock Opinions on Social Media. Journal of Management Information Systems, 36(2), 391-417.

† corresponding author;

* the authors are listed alphabetically or in reverse order of seniority

Business Cases

Shan Huang†, Shipeng Yan, Zhenhui Jiang, & Minying Huang (2022), ESG at WeChat Pay to Support SMEs, Asia Case Research Centre
Shan Huang†, Xiaoming Yuan, and Minying Huang (2025), Algorithm Innovation at Huawei Cloud, Asia Case Research Centre, forthcoming

Research-in-progress (Highlight)

LLM-based Causal Inference: A Multi-Agent System

Book (in progress)

Experimentation at Scale: Methods and Practice from China’s Tech Frontier

with Yunfei Han* (Bytedance), Jinyong Ma* (Bytedance), Yong Wang* (Tencent), and Kenny Xie* (Google)

S.

Research Interests

Technology-Enabled Marketing Strategies and Decision-Making

AI in Marketing Decisions, Causal and Experimentation Methods (e.g., long-term treatment effects in A/B tests), New Social Media Platforms, Social Networks

Publications

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Business Cases

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