Professional Activities

Pei Xu is George Phillips Privett Associate Professor of Business Analytics at Auburn University. She has been on Auburn faculty since 2014. Her research focus is on understanding the economic and social impact of emerging information technology, in areas including online user-generated content, crowdsourcing, social media for e-commerce and healthcare, and FinTech. In her research, a variety of quantitative approaches (e.g., econometrics & causal inference, statistics, machine learning, text mining, data scraping) are leveraged to discover insights from corporate datasets. She has presented her work at numerous conferences and published in high-quality peer-reviewed journals, including several Financial Times' Top 50 Business Journals. 

She offers multiple business analytics courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels, which cover a variety of data analytics skills using tools such as Python, Tableau, JMP and Stata. She is the winner of the departmental teaching award in 2022. Pei also serves as the Director of  Auburn Business Analytics Case Competition.

Selected Publications

1. “The Untamed Frontier of Brands' Social Media Pages: How Uncivil Consumer Replies Lead to Perceived Injustice, Perceived Ostracism, and Consumer Disengagement.”, with Wolter, J., Bacile, T., Journal of Service Research. 2022 May.
2. “Blockchain as supply chain technology: considering transparency and security.” with Lee, J., Barth, J.R., Richey, R. G.,  International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management, 2021, 51(3), 305-324.
3. “Understanding the Impact of Crowd Voting on Participation in Crowdsourcing Contests.” with Chen, L., Liu, D., Journal of Management Information Systems, 2020, 37(2), pp.510-535.
4. “Employee satisfaction trajectories and their effect on customer satisfaction and repatronage intentions”, with Wolter, J. S., Bock, D., Mackey, J., Smith, J. S., Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2019, 47(5), pp. 815-836. 
5. "Product Engagement and Identity Signaling: The Role of Likes in Social Commerce for Fashion Products." with Liu, D., Information & Management, 2019, 56(2), pp.143-154.