This year, the UD Alfred Lerner College welcomed several new faculty members into its community. Yuanchen Su is an assistant professor of marketing; she spoke with Lerner about her research focus and what made her want to teach at University of Delaware.
Lerner: What is your professional and academic background?
Su: I hold a Ph.D. in business administration (marketing concentration) and a M.S. in industrial engineering from the University of Minnesota, and a B.E. in automation from Tsinghua University.
Lerner: What is your research focus?
Su: My research interests lie broadly in quantitative marketing with an emphasis on incentive design, social interactions and competitive strategies. In my current research, I study how gamification incentives, such as sales leaderboards and random rewards, can impact sales performance.
Lerner: What inspired you to work in your field/research/subject area?
Su: I am always interested in how incentive can influence people’s productivity. While the traditional sales incentives have been studied a lot, gamification incentives (contests, leaderboards, random rewards, progress bars), which are relatively new and have been used in many domains like sports and education, are less studied in the sales domain. We are quite unclear about how and why these gamification incentives work or do not work.
Lerner: What is it about UD that made you want to work/teach/research here?
Su: I loved it when I first visited here. UD has a beautiful campus in a lovely town (convenient itself and close to big cities). Lerner, BUAD department, and marketing group are so supportive and give me the confidence that I can be happy working here.
Lerner: What course are you most excited to teach at Lerner?
Su: [I am most excited to teach] Marketing Analytics. I can share the analytics knowledge as well as how analytics can be applied in marketing with my students. I enjoy sharing this.
Lerner: What is something unique about you that may surprise your peers/students? (hobby, talent, experience etc.)
Su: I’m a Mongol (蒙古族) Chinese and from Inner Mongolia, a landlocked province, but I am a dedicated swimmer.