Steve (Shitai) Zhang
About
I am a Quantitative Marketing PhD candidate at NYU Stern School of Business. I am grateful to be advised by Bryan K. Bollinger and Raluca M. Ursu. My research develops and estimates structural models to recover key economic primitives underlying consumer decision making, with a particular focus on financial constraints, durable product adoption, consumer search behavior, and sustainability.
My job market paper studies the joint adoption of residential solar panels and electric vehicles. Both technologies carry large upfront costs, long payback periods, and meaningful complementarities in use, features that make adoption sensitive to household finances and to where households sit in the life cycle. I build a life-cycle model of household adoption with four core ingredients: financial constraints, economic complementarity between the two technologies, life-cycle variation in adoption incentives, and forward-looking expectations over declining technology prices. I use the model to evaluate alternative policy designs that can broaden access to these technologies, and to show how financial constraints mask the complementarity between them, suppressing joint adoption among the households who would gain most from it.
In related work, I examine consumer search and platform design, studying how information disclosures such as carbon labels affect flight search behavior and choice in digital marketplaces.
I am on the 2026/27 academic job market.