Kai Zhu
My research broadly seeks to understand how digital technologies change market, media, politics, and society. I am particular interested in the impact of digital transformation in cultural markets, e.g. news, books, movies, music. In my research, I leverage various computational tools, such as machine learning, natural language processing, causal inference, and network analysis, to analyze large-scale structured and unstructured data in real-world to learn about human behavior and system dynamics.
Research interests
Computational Social Science, Text as Data, Social Networks, Digital Platforms
Working papers
Jumping the Great Firewall: Understanding Citizen Resilience to Internet Censorship in China
Does Shooting Incidences Increase Gun Sales? Evidence from Exposure to Gun Violence through Social Network
The Promise and Pitfalls of AI Technology in Bridging Digital Language Divide: Insights from Machine Translation on Wikipedia
Giveaway for a Price: Understanding the Supply and Demand Responses to Platform Monetization
Selected Publications