According to the Notice on the Evaluation Results of Projects Applied for Centralized Reception by NSFC in 2022 released on the official website of the National Natural Science Foundation of China on September 8, 20472 general projects, 761 key projects, 79 key international (regional) cooperative research projects, 22262 youth science fund projects, 630 outstanding youth science fund projects, 25 outstanding youth science fund projects (Hong Kong and Macao), 415 National Science Fund projects for Distinguished Young Scholars, 43 innovative research group projects, 3521 regional science fund projects, and 109 foreign scholar research fund projects (including 49 foreign outstanding young scholar research fund projects and 60 foreign senior scholar research fund projects) will be approved in 2022.
This year, the Asia Europe Business School (AEBS) of East China Normal University continued its efforts and made another major breakthrough. A total of three full-time teachers were approved for one general program and two youth science fund programs, all of whom are young teachers in the marketing discipline. Last year, two teachers in the marketing discipline of AEBS were approved by the National Science Fund.
Project 1
The project Research on the Impact of External Threats on Green Consumption Attitude and Behavior declared by Associate Professor Wang Xuehua of ECNU’s Asia Europe Business School was approved by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Project Introduction
The intensification of environmental threats has drawn consumers’ attention to green consumption. China has successively put forward strategies such as carbon peaking and carbon neutralization, which put the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions at the top of the list, and proposed that green production and lifestyle should be widely formed by 2035. However, in fact, green consumption only accounts for a small part of people's total consumption. How to guide consumers to form a green consumption mode is still a problem to be solved. In particular, many consumers have reduced their expenditures during the pandemic, which inevitably affected the expenditure of green consumption. Therefore, it is obviously not enough to study green consumption only from the perspective of environmental threats.
Green consumption, also known as sustainable consumption, refers to all kinds of consumption behaviors and consumption modes generated by consumers from the perspective of protecting the ecological environment in the process of the product purchase or subsequent treatment, including not only green product purchase, but also moderate consumption control to avoid environmental damage,
effective utilization of energy and recycling of materials. Consumers have been exposed to different threats, both real and symbolic. Real threats refer to threats that affect people's survival, such as environmental threats; Symbolic threats refer to threats that affect values, such as social threats. The sudden COVID-19 pandemic has aggravated the impact of these external threats. This project aims to study the reaction mechanism caused by external threats and its impact on green consumption attitudes and behaviors.
Project Leader
Wang Xuehua, associate professor and master's supervisor of the Asia Europe Business School of East China Normal University, graduated from the City University of Hong Kong with a doctor's degree in marketing. She mainly teaches marketing management, strategic brand management, social science methodology, social psychology, and other courses in English. She has published more than 20 papers in the top and authoritative journals such as Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Service Research, and Journal of Business Research, and presided over relevant NSFC projects.
Project 2
The project Platform Master's Entry, Complementary Strategic Response and Platform Ecosystem Value Creation declared by Assistant Professor Yang Feifei of ECNU’s Asia Europe Business School was approved by the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars.
Project Introduction
In recent years, the platform economy has developed vigorously. The platforms mainly provide digital infrastructure, and the open architecture attracts complementarities to enter, so as to jointly provide users with products and services and realize value co-creation through cooperation. However, the cooperative relationship between platform owners and complementors is highly asymmetric, and the relationship between them is not always cooperative or complementary. In order to obtain more value, the platform owner may imitate the products of the complementary and become direct competitors against each other. For example, JD purchases directly from suppliers, sells products made by JD on its platform and competes directly with third-party sellers. With the platform becoming dominant, platform owners use their market power to participate in competitions and form a monopoly, which has attracted the attention of policymakers.
The research focuses on the explorations of the mode and driving factors for platform owners to choose to enter the market of their complementors and become their competitor, the analysis of the logic of strategic response when the complementors are faced with the competitive threat from the platform owner, and the revelation of the impact mechanism of platform owners' entry into the complementary market field on the value creation of the platform ecosystem. The research aims to establish a theoretical framework for the competition between platform owners and complementary competitors within the research platform. The project focuses on the tension between value creation and value acquisition between platform owners and complementors. The research results will be of great significance for platform owners to choose competitive strategies and for complementors to take response strategies to mitigate the risk of value misappropriation, and for the supervision of relevant institutions on the platform.
Project Leader
Yang Feifei, assistant professor of the Asia Europe Business School of East China Normal University, received a doctorate in strategic management from the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research fields include platform strategy, international entrepreneurship, and innovation. Additionally, she presided over a project of philosophy and social science planning in Shanghai, and her works have been published in the Journal of Business Ethics, Information & Management, Journal of Business Research, and other international journals. Currently, she is mainly engaged in teaching courses including strategic management, creative thinking, and business innovation projects for undergraduate and graduate students of AEBS.
Project 3
The project Research on the Impact of Digital Consumer Credit on Consumer Inequality and Countermeasures in the Perspective of Inclusive Finance declared by Assistant Professor Ma Xuejing of ECNU’s Asia Europe Business School was approved by the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars.
Project Introduction
Solving the problem of unbalanced and insufficient development is an important issue for promoting common prosperity and improving people's well-being. An important manifestation of unbalanced and insufficient economic development is the inequality of consumption. Inclusive finance is considered as one of the effective ways to improve economic imbalance. This project focuses on the important carrier of inclusive finance - digital consumer credit, explores its role in reducing consumption inequality, examines its internal mechanism and boundary conditions affecting consumption inequality, and designs optimization strategies for credit use behavior of low-income groups based on the analysis. Specifically, this project aims to answer three questions: whether to use digital consumer credit, how to use digital consumer credit, and how to optimize the use of digital consumer credit, which will help to mitigate the adverse impact of consumption inequality. In terms of theoretical value, unlike previous studies which mostly used macro data, focused on consumption growth, and ignored specific credit use behavior, this project uses large-scale microdata for analysis, which not only tests whether the adoption of digital consumer credit can effectively alleviate consumption inequality, but also pays attention to the effect of the amount and type of credit consumption after adoption. In terms of application value, the project provides countermeasures for when to take measures, aim at what kind of consumers, and what kind of intervention measures can be taken to alleviate consumption inequality.
Project Leader
Ma Xuejing is an assistant professor of ECNU’s Asia Europe Business School. Doctor of Management from Peking University, visiting doctoral student at the University of Southern California, and a bachelor of management and engineering from Renmin University of China. Her researches mainly focus on social and new media, using quantitative models to study the content provision, consumption, and pricing of online platforms.
Introduction to the discipline characteristic research direction of brand strategy and enterprise growth”
The characteristic research direction of the discipline of Brand Strategy and Enterprise Growth of AEBS relies on the first-level doctoral program of business administration. The academic leader of the program is Professor He Jiaxun, the winner of the New Century Excellent Talent Program of China’s Ministry of Education and the winner of the Shanghai Pujiang Talent Program. The program has the development concept of aiming at the international frontier and facing the national strategy, uniting with academic forces around the world, continuing to improve the international influence and academic competitiveness of the discipline direction, and making fundamental and important contributions to the construction and development of the business administration discipline.
In January 2017, he presided over the establishment of the High-end Brand Management master's degree and new discipline direction with the partner Emlyon Business School in France. Based on the professional training of doctoral and master's degree programs in the first-level discipline of business administration, the purpose of the establishment of the degree is to form an education system with the theoretical logic of collaborative brand strategy between enterprises and customers, which is different from that of European and American systems. It was established to fit in the high-tech industry, innovate high-end brand strategy and management knowledge systems, target the talent demand of China's high-tech enterprises for brand upgrading, and cultivate compound innovative management leadership talents with global market working ability.
With the National Brand Strategy Research Center, a key think tank of East China Normal University, as an important academic support, six sessions of China Brand Science and Application Forum and International Symposium on Global Brand Strategy were successfully held, which gained great influence at home and abroad; The views and comments of think tanks were successively reported by the Global Times, South China Morning Post, Shanghai Daily, China International Television and other mainstream media at home and abroad. On December 29, 2021, the National Brand Strategy Research Center officially released the second Summer National Champion Brand Intensity Index of 2021.