Professor Shu-ling Liao Research Profile

Marketing faculty member, Shuling Liao, has focused on the theory development of new consumer behaviors emerged in the Internet environment, and in the meantime expanded and advanced the research in the area of branding and innovation failure .

Liao and her co-author Chu, in a series of online reselling research, identified the phenomenon of online resale and described the new role of consumer as seller in an online consumer-to-consumer context. Liao and Chu not only established taxonomy of online consumer sellers but also predicted the “selling easier and buying faster” psychology. Liao’s work of on resale titled “Buying Faster When Expecting Selling Easier: The Economic Psychology of Online Resale” and “Influence of Consumer Online Resale Awareness on Purchase Decisions: A Mental Accounting Perspective” has been published respectively in Journal of Business Research and European Journal of Marketing.

Another stream of Liao’s research that has received great attention and inquiry is the impact of innovation failure on brand attitude and relationship. In this series, the first article titled “Consumer Evaluation of Self-service Innovation Failure: The Effect of Brand Equity and Attribution” published in Service Industries Journal investigated how consumers make attribution towards high/low equity brands when the brands encounter innovation failure. The second article titled “Brand equity and the exacerbating factors of product innovation failure evaluations: A communication effect perspective” published in Journal of Business Research further examined how innovation preannouncement could possibly exacerbate negative effect of innovation failure on high-equity brands and how an authoritative industry leader’s talk can help to ease the awkward situation faced by the brand under innovation failure. The third article titled “Adverse behavioral and relational consequences of service innovation failure” published in Journal of Business Research extends to scrutinize how functional, psychological, and dysfunctional innovation failure could lead to consumer anti-consumption and dysfunctional behaviors and poor brand relationship quality.

In the past five years, Liao’s articles have received high downloading and citation. She has been granted by the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology five multi-year research projects and also awarded four times for excellence of research performance.