Ziwen Chen
Ziwen Chen
Research Statement
I study how firms differentiate, innovate, and create value within cultural and knowledge environments. Drawing on cultural and economic sociology, my research examines how systems of meaning shape the way organizations position their products, assemble new ideas, and influence broader cultural life. Methodologically, I combine large-scale computational analysis of text and images with surveys and experiments. My research has appeared in Research Policy and has been supported by grants from Stanford VPGE and SIEPR.
Research Interests
- Social Evaluation
- Economic Sociology
- Innovation and Technology
- Computational Social Science
Job Market Paper
Racial classifications typically reproduce status hierarchies, disadvantaging minority-associated identities in domains from hiring to housing. This paper identifies a boundary condition of that pattern in the women's fashion market, where retailers assign human first names to products. Using more than 1.3 million Shopify listings, I show that minority-named products command systematically higher prices than comparable White-named products. I call this reversal the minority premium. Using an abductive approach, I evaluate two explanations: an omnivorousness account, in which elite consumers value minority-associated products as a form of cosmopolitan or diversity-signaling consumption, and a differentiation account, in which minority-associated names simply mark a product as distinct from an implicitly White market default. Four preregistered experiments with 1,248 participants replicate the premium at the consumer level, and the evidence favors differentiation. Experimentally fixing differentiation reduces the premium, whereas income, education, race, and omnivorous consumption do not reliably moderate it. These findings show that the evaluative meaning of racialized signals depends on market context: classifications that reproduce disadvantages when attached to people can generate value when attached to products in markets organized around uniqueness and differentiation.