Students Recognize Master Teacher

Marketing professor Bobby Zhou’s keychain holds more than the keys to unlock his car, house and office at the at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. When asked about his interesting hobbies, he hoists up the collection of baubles and metal rings, and points to a small piece of plastic with a barcode.

It’s his gym pass. Or, more accurately, it’s his yoga studio pass. “I have been practicing hot yoga for a while now,” he says. “And I absolutely love it.” Zhou attends hot yoga class just about every day. Unlike regular yoga, the exercises are performed under hot and humid conditions. 

“I’m not terribly good at it to be honest,” Zhou says. “But I really enjoy it. It’s a wonderful form of meditation. And if you think about it, we dump our trash every single day — either from our office or from our home. We should also be mindful of dumping our mental trash on a timely basis, right?”

When Zhou steps off his mat and puts on his professor cap, he can be found teaching classes at all levels — from undergraduate marketing research electives to executive MBA courses. And if he had to pick a favorite, he probably couldn’t, at least by his own admission.

“I thoroughly enjoy each one of those classes,” he says. “Because to me, teaching is a very interactive process. Most of my students are motivated to learn, and as long as they have this great desire and motivation to learn, I’m extremely pumped.”

Zhou's students appreciate his passion for teaching. When undergraduate students launched the Faculty Member of Distinction awards in 2016, Zhou was voted as one of three inaugural recipients. He also has won the Allen J. Krowe Award for Teaching Excellence and a Distinguished Teaching Award at Maryland Smith.

Zhou’s research focuses on competitive marketing strategies with a specific emphasis on pricing and promotion. He is currently studying family cell phone plans, in addition to a phenomenon he’s coined as “the impact of anticipated regret.”

Let’s say, for example, that you’re in the market for a new blender. You read reviews, do your research, and narrow it down to two options. The first option is more powerful and has more functionalities, but it is also more expensive. The second choice is not as fancy, but it gets the job done and is cheaper. You decide to go the cost-savings route and purchase blender number two.

But then after a few months, you realize that the cheap blender just doesn’t cut it. It lacks one or two key functions that you wish it had. Suddenly, you’re back to square one. And you might begin feeling that pang of regret: Maybe you should have spent the extra cash to spare yourself the headache of going through the shopping process all over again.

This is what Zhou calls “under-purchase regret.” If you had bought the more expensive blender only to realize that the cheaper one probably would’ve sufficed, then you’d have “over-purchase regret.”

“It looks like, to say the very least, consumers display a non-trivial, pretty significant amount of anticipated regret if whatever purchase decision they have made does not turn out to be ex post optimal,” Zhou explains. “So we wrote up this paper studying the firm’s optimal pricing and product line design strategy in the presence of consumers’ anticipated regret.”

That paper is under revision, and Zhou says he’s “really psyched” to share the study more broadly.

“Regardless of whom I share this research idea with, they always get excited,” he says. “They say, ‘Oh, I could give you some more examples about a variety of regrets I have had anticipating a new purchase.’ As you can see, it relates to our daily life.”

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