Zhen (Richard) Tang, Ph.D.

Biography

You can contact Zhen Tang at zhen.tang@lmu.edu.

Zhen Tang, who also goes by Richard, is from Huaiyuan, a beautiful one-million-population small town in eastern China. Although Richard wanted to be a software engineer... when he was in high school, he graduated from East China University of Science and Technology with B.A. and M.S. in Business Administration. Richard then earned his Ph.D. in Marketing with a minor in Economics from the University of Arizona. By training, he is an econometrician, using quantitative methods to address real business challenges. One stream of his research focuses on business location decisions, helping companies and business owners to select the best locations to grow and flourish. In addition, he also conducts research on improving employees’ productivity and well-being. In recent years, Richard has started to employ natural language processing and neural network to analyze social emotions and perceptions associated with topics (e.g., spirituality) and entities (e.g., a company or brand) he is interested in.

In a recent grant project sponsored by California 100 Initiative, Richard and colleagues studied California’s business climate and drew implications for California’s sustainable development. Richard also works with Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC) and World Trade Center Los Angeles (WTCLA) on annual reports of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in California and Los Angeles, serving international investors and the local communities in economic development.

Richard teaches business analytics, natural language processing, machine learning, and marketing strategy. In his life, Richard enjoys many sports and cooking.

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Education (3)

University of Arizona: Ph.D., Marketing 2019

East China University of Science and Technology: M.S., Marketing 2013

East China University of Science and Technology: B.A., Marketing 2010

Social

Areas of Expertise (6)

Organizational Economics

Inter-firm Relationships

Business Analytics

Sales Management

Franchising

Service Marketing

Accomplishments (1)

Mentorship (professional)

2020-11-09

Vincent Chen, MSBA ’20 and Kayla Tanli, MSBA ’20, advised by Richard Tang, conducted a training workshop at the IM Data Annual Conference about building a SEIR model for predicting COVID-19 for the Computational Challenge launched by the City of Los Angeles and RMDS and they illustrated the model’s impressive predictive power.

Event Appearances (2)

"How Data Analytics Can Be Misleading: Context, Method, and Validity"

IM Data Annual Conference  Virtual Workshop

2020-11-09

Application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in business analytics

RMDS  Virtual

2020-11-30

Articles (1)

Commentary—Lessons from Nature: Enhancing the Adaptable Potential of Service Ecosystems

Service Science

2016-03-07

Organisms and species have evolved through adaptation and extinction for over a billion years. Service science can learn from this large library of success and failure because species interact and struggle for survival in biological ecosystems in many of the same way as organizations and other actors behaves in service ecosystems. The authors draw upon their collective knowledge of biological ecosystems, biological evolution, business, and service science to develop an integrated framework, including rules of adaptability, adaptability practices, and guidelines for creating adaptable systems. Collectively, these key lessons from the biological world can be used to help organizations be a vital part of service ecosystems adaptability and can be the catalyst for the emergence of innovation.

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