Seung Yoon Lee
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Quantitative Marketing at the Yale School of Management.
My research focuses on managing customer relationships in digital and virtual environments, including personalized virtual environment design and marketing content generation.
Research Interests: Metaverse Design, Multimodal Content Design, Generative AI
In July 2025, I will join the Chinese University of Hong Kong as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Marketing.
Email: seungyoon.lee@yale.edu
*Updated CV available soon
Job Market Paper
A Structural Model of Utility Generation in Virtual Environments: Application to Personalized Gaming
(with K. Sudhir and Kosuke Uetake)
* draft available upon request
Abstract
We build a dynamic structural model of player response to game environment incentives, where player decisions to spend time (play) and money (purchase "tools'') are dynamically interlinked: purchases change the utility from play, both contemporaneously and across time. The model generalizes dynamic durable goods purchase models (where only purchases are made) and dynamic models of effort/time response (as in incentive compensation models); this makes our model suitable for novel virtual and gamified environments requiring both time/effort and money inputs (e.g., digital learning/health habits, gamified loyalty programs). We provide substantive insight into how purchases interact with the environment and produce dynamic complementarities/substitutions in future play and purchase decisions. Estimates using data from a single player golf game reveal three latent segments of players: premium enthusiasts who derive enjoyment from play itself and are the most willing to purchase tools; and win-seekers and progress-seekers who both find playing the game itself costly and have higher price sensitivity-- the former primarily values immediate rewards, while the latter also values level-up rewards. We use model counterfactuals to demonstrate how interventions, such as free tool-giving/discounts or difficulty adjustments, can produce opposing effects and generate personalized policies that maximize net dynamic complementarities between purchases.