Shan’s research focuses on the digital economy, social networks, and business analytics. Her current work investigates how new social media shapes the information environment and decision making that leads to non-negligible economic and social impacts. Specifically, her studies examine how social advertising and social referral affect product virality, how emotions shape online content diffusion, and how misinformation diffuses through weak ties in massive social networks. 

Shan has a particular interest in understanding how certain phenomena vary across individuals, social ties, products, and markets, using population-scale datasets and large-scale field tests, and uses various research methodologies, including large-scale networked randomized field experiments, machine learning, and network analysis to pursue her research agenda. 

Shan’s research has been published in prominent management journals, including Marketing Science and the Journal of Management Information Systems. She also collaborates with leading tech firms, such as Tencent, to understand cutting-edge digital phenomena and their implications for business and society. 

She received a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University, a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia, and a Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management.