The 72th Session of the Series of Academic Lectures Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Founding of the Central University of Finance and Economics and the 22th Session of the Excellent Academic Forum Lecture Series in 2024 Are Successfully Held

On the afternoon of October 25, 2024, the Business School held the 72th Session of the Series of Academic Lectures Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Founding of Central University of Finance and Economics and the 22th Session of the Excellent Academic Forum Lecture Series in 2024 at the Conference Room 615 of the Main Teaching Building on the Xueyuan South Road Campus of the Central University of Finance and Economics. Associate Professor Huang Liang from Tsinghua University was invited as the guest speaker of this lecture. Teachers, doctoral students and undergraduate students from the Business School attended this event.

This meeting was chaired by Professor Gu Leilei from the Business School. Before the official start of this lecture, Professor Gu Leilei introduced Associate Professor Huang Liang’s resume in detail. Huang Liang is an associate professor of marketing at Tsinghua University. Her research focuses on consumer judgment and decision-making, financial service innovation, and interaction between consumers and technology. The findings have been published in journals such as Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Letters and Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. She has been awarded the Consumer Financial Well-Being (CFWB) Emerging Scholar Award and the Lincoln Financial Best Paper Award.

The topic of Huang Liang’s lecture is “My Face, My Choice: How and Why Facial Payment Makes the Payor More Willing to Diverge”. Despite the rapid adoption of face-scanning payment technology worldwide, psychologists, consumer researchers, and business practitioners still know very little about the psychological basis and behavioral consequences of face-scanning payment. To address this gap, this research uses laboratory and field data to demonstrate that face-scanning payment would make payers less happy and less willing to spread positive word-of-mouth (WOM) about a product than other mainstream payment methods (e.g. credit card payment and mobile payment) when observing that others make the same purchase decision. Further research suggests that this effect is not driven by the novelty of the technology or the pain of the payment, but by the high level of focus on self-identity caused by face-scanning payment. According to this theoretical explanation, this research demonstrates that the effectiveness of face-scanning payment would diminish when people focus on the utilitarian value (rather than self-signing) of products, when products are used in private (rather than public) environments, and when individuals can confirm their identity in individual tasks.

After the sharing, with regard to the topic of Huang Liang’s lecture, the attending teachers and students actively participated in the discussion about research methods, publication of high-level papers, and topic selection and so on, further deepening their academic exchanges.

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.