When Food Gets Political: How Does News Drive Green Food Offerings?
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Time & Date
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10:30 am
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12:00 pm,
August
11,
2025
(Monday)
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Venue
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Room D504, Teaching Complex D Building
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| TOPIC | When Food Gets Political: How Does News Drive Green Food Offerings? |
| TIME&DATE |
August 11, 2025 (Monday) 10:30 am -12:00 pm |
| Venue | Room D504, Teaching Complex D Building |
| Speaker |
Boya Xu Virginia Tech |
| Abstract | We study how social media publicity affects the early-stage adoption of sustainable food technologies by local businesses. Understanding this connection is challenging because of the lack of empirical measurement of local business decisions at scale and, more importantly, the endogeneity of social media publicity to unobserved local demand shocks. Focusing on the case of impossible meat products, we devise a unique location specific adoption metric based on social media announcements between 2015 and 2019. We propose a novel identification strategy that leverages the quasi-random variations of county-quarter-level news production for different topics to causally identify the linkage between social media publicity and adoption. We find that local news coverage of impossible meat products increases local restaurants’ and stores’ adoption of the focal green food technology. Interestingly, the elasticity of adoption to news is higher among more liberal regions, and news content about producer financials was the main contributor to identifying the causal effect of news on local businesses’ adoption of impossible meat products. |
| Biography |
Boya Xu is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on platform design, digital content strategy, and the economics of emerging technologies. Specifically, she studies: (1) how social media publicity influences the adoption of innovations such as green food technologies; (2) how algorithmic components interact to shape bias in online recommendations; and (3) the dynamics of influencer marketing, including influencers’ creation of controversial content and its business impact, influencers’ debunking behaviors and framing of financial expectations. Boya’s research combines methods from econometrics, online experimentation, and unstructured data analytics. She was recognized as the recipient of the 2024 Doctoral Dissertation Research Award by the American Statistical Association (Marketing Section). Before joining Virginia Tech, Boya received her BS in Statistics from Zhejiang University and MA in Economics and Ph.D. in Marketing from Duke University. |
