04/22/2025
By Qianlei Chen

The Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation (MEI) at the Manning School of Business invites you to a doctoral dissertation proposal by Charley Qianlei Chen, a Ph.D. candidate, whose doctoral program concentration is marketing. All interested students and faculty members are warmly invited to attend.

Date: Friday, May 2, 2025
Time: 3-4:30 p.m.
Location (hybrid mode): Pulichino Tong Building (PTB), Room 462 or remote Zoom link.

Thesis/Dissertation Title: Three Essays on Niche Market Leaders and Subscription Sales

Committee Members
1) Sunny Li Sun, Ph.D., (Co-chair), Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation, Manning School of Business, UMass Lowell
2) Spencer Ross, Ph.D.,  (Co-chair), Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation, Manning School of Business, UMass Lowell
3) Tony Tao Gao, Ph.D., Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation, Manning School of Business, UMass Lowell

Abstract:
This two-part dissertation proposal is drawn from three essays. The 1st essay in Part I examines the impact of niche market leaders, represented by privately-owned firms emerging in industrial clusters, on the survival of different types of actors like foreign- or state-owned firms in China’s business ecosystem. The panel data spans from 1998 to 2015, and includes more than 4 million observations of various types of industrial firms whose annual sales should exceed a threshold as set in China’s national survey of manufacturers.

The 2nd essay in Part II is a comprehensive literature review and critique of the subscription business research. The retrieved 96 research articles about contemporary subscription sales and service/program are grouped into five domains, covering B2C retail subscriptions of tangible goods, B2C subscriptions of services, B2B industrial subscriptions, econometric modelling study of subscriptions, and customer loyalty-enhanced subscription service/program. The major research streams and models in each domain have been discussed, as well as the critique of the present research. The author suggests conceptualizing “subscription sales” through the process and dynamic views, and exploring an inherent mechanism by scrutinizing the factors that could affect customer value and decisions over the cycles in subscription journey.

The 3rd essay in Part II relates to the conceptual exploration with real option logic and empirical studies of contemporary subscription sales. Real option is to take an opportunity (decision) with initial real asset investment, which confers a right, not an obligation, to the investor who can undertake actions in the future for greater benefits (Myers, 1977). The subscribers aspire to the perceived customer value delivered by suppliers through a subscription journey over cycles of available options (decision alternatives) such as subscribing, cancelling, deferring, retaining, or up/downgrading plans, switching suppliers, etc. This article broaches two propositions regarding flexibility and the right and ease of cancellation, and four hypotheses regarding uncertainty, flexibility, and irreversibility which affect the value of options and subscribers’ behavior in journey. The article also discusses the design of surveys and experiments to empirically test hypotheses.