At 9:45 a.m., November 30, 2022, the Business School of Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE) held the 22nd Session of the Excellent Academic Forum Lecture Series in 2022 and the 3rd Session of the Data Science Lecture Series online through Tencent Meeting. Natasha Zhang Foutz, a professor at the McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia, was invited as the keynote speaker of this lecture, and more than 30 people (including teachers, master and doctoral students, and undergraduate students) attended this lecture.

    Sun Luping, an associate professor of the Department of Marketing of the Business School, presided over this meeting and introduced professor Foutz’s resume. Dr. Foutz is a tenured associate professor at the McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia. He majors in quantitative marketing models. His research results have been published in top journals such as Journal of Marketing Research and Marketing Science. She currently serves as the field editor-in-chief of the FT50 journal “Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science”, and teaches such courses as marketing analysis, entertainment marketing and marketing models. She has won the best paper award at authoritative academic conferences, the teaching excellence award of the University of Virginia and other honors.

    The topic of professor Foutz’s lecture is “Optimal Freemium Pricing of Digital Content via Large-scale Randomized Field Experiment and Content Analysis”. The online content industry, such as e-books and online music, usually adopts a freemium model, which allows consumers to read or listen to a portion of the content for free and then profit from the subsequent content. Professor Foutz and his collaborators conducted a large-scale field experiment on a large online novel platform in China, adopted text analysis methods to explore the optimal charging strategy of enterprises under the freemium model, and attempted to explain the underlying mechanism.

    After the sharing, the attending teachers and students actively participated in the discussion, and professor Foutz answered their questions in an enthusiastic manner, further deepening their academic exchanges. Finally, professor Foutz talked about the publishing trends of top journals in the fields such as marketing and information systems in the past two years, providing a reference for people to carry out high-level scientific research work.

    The “Excellent Academic Forum” is an academic exchange platform established by the Business School to fulfill the mission of “contributing new management knowledge”, which focuses on cutting-edge theoretical issues and organizational development dilemmas in the discipline of business administration and the Chinese enterprise management practice, and brings together frontier ideas and innovative ideas in China and abroad, so as to explore Chinese solutions for China's social and economic development.