At 10:00 a.m. on Monday, November 3rd, 2025, the 29th Session of the Excellent Academic Forum of CUFE Business School was successfully held in Conference Room 615 of the Main Teaching Building at the Xueyuan South Road Campus.Dr. Chu Yuanfang, a Postdoctoral Fellow from the Department of Finance at the Business School of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, was invited as the keynote speaker for this forum.More than 10 participants attended this academic event, including Teachers, doctoral students and master's students from CUFE Business School, as well as scholars from other universities.
The forum was hosted by Assistant Professor Gao Zhennan from CUFE Business School. At the beginning of the event, Assistant Professor Gao introduced Dr. Chu Yuanfang’s academic background to the participants. Dr. Chu graduated from the Business School of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and currently serves as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Finance at the business school. Her research mainly focuses on empirical corporate finance, product market competition, information environment, corporate innovation, and financial frictions. To date, she has several papers under review at top international journals such as Management Science and Journal of Accounting Research. She has also presented her research at major academic conferences at home and abroad, including FMA, SFA, and CICF, and has won multiple Best Paper Awards.
The theme of Dr. Chu Yuanfang’s lecture was "Social Media Reactions to Product Launches and Competitive Responses". Based on data from a major social media platform, she empirically examined whether firms’ product market strategies are related to the social media reactions triggered by competitors’ product launches. The study found that product launches significantly boost the intensity of social media discussions. When competitors’ new products receive strong attention (especially positive sentiment), firms adjust their own product supply to a greater extent in the following year. Further analysis showed that high attention is associated with greater product differentiation, while under moderate attention, positive sentiment drives product supply convergence. These effects remain robust after controlling for other information channels, product market dynamics, and firm characteristics. Dr. Chu argued that social media, as a real-time and crowdsourced external information source, can reflect the consumer base and new product preferences—a mechanism that is particularly prominent in product-related discussions and market-oriented industries. Her research provides important evidence for understanding how the information environment in the digital age reshapes firms’ competitive strategies.
After the lecture, teachers and students in attendance conducted in-depth and lively discussions around the lecture theme, focusing on topics such as the role of social media as an information intermediary, the dynamic adjustment of product competition strategies, the identification strategy of empirical research, and the future trends of digital marketing. These discussions further deepened the exchange and collision of academic ideas.
As an important platform for CUFE Business School to fulfill its mission of "contributing new management knowledge", the "Excellent Academic Forum" is committed to focusing on cutting-edge issues in the field of business administration and Chinese enterprise management practice. It gathers global wisdom and innovative perspectives to provide theoretical support and practical paths for promoting the sustainable development of Chinese society and economy.
