Hyunhee Woo

Hyunhee Woo holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration (Marketing) from Korea University Business School. Founded in 1905, Korea University is one of South Korea’s leading private research universities and a full academic member of the CEMS Global Alliance. Its Business School is accredited by both AACSB and EQUIS (each for five years) and was ranked 28th globally in Marketing by the QS World University Rankings (2025). During her doctoral studies, her research focused on digital platforms, unstructured data, and consumer behavior. Under the rigorous mentorship of Prof. Shijin Yoo, she developed expertise in quantitative marketing methodologies, particularly causal inference, panel data analysis, and data analytics. Her doctoral research was supported by the Global Ph.D. Fellowship (2018–2020), funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea.

She received her M.A. in Management (Art and Culture Management) from Hongik University, established in 1946 and recognized as a leading institution in South Korea for its strong programs in art, design, and cultural studies. The Art and Culture Management program emphasizes interdisciplinary thinking by integrating business strategy with cultural and artistic perspectives. During her master’s studies, she worked as a research assistant on an NRF-funded project (2014–2016) led by Prof. Hyung Jun Ahn in the Department of Information Systems, exploring personality profiling through SNS text data for personalized services. Her thesis examined how the Big Five personality dimensions influence the meaning of happiness in experiential consumption, using a mixed-methods approach combining text analytics and survey data.

She earned her B.A. in Art from Seoul National University of Science and Technology, a public university in Seoul with a 125-year history and a strong reputation in both science and technology as well as the arts. As an undergraduate, she specialized in ceramics, focusing on the design of sculptural artworks and functional craft objects using clay and other ceramic materials. Her creative work was recognized with two national design awards: selection in the 40th Korea Industrial Design Exhibition (Industrial Craft & Jewelry Design category, 2005) and the 26th Seoul Contemporary Ceramic Art Competition (2006).

This integrative educational background—spanning business, culture, and art—provides a strong foundation for her work as a marketing scholar, enabling her to approach consumer research with both analytical precision and design-driven insight.

Before transitioning into academia, Hyunhee Woo spent seven years working as a marketing professional in South Korea’s construction and interior design industries. She is deeply proud of this experience, which allowed her to engage with diverse aspects of marketing—from strategic planning and product development to digital communication and brand management. She remains especially grateful to the two companies she worked with—IS Dongseo and Eagon Group—for giving her the opportunity to grow as a marketer and to work alongside talented professionals who valued creativity, collaboration, and purpose-driven communication.

She began her career at IS Dongseo, a company established in 1975 as a spin-off from Hyundai Group’s civil engineering division. At IS Dongseo, Woo worked on company-wide marketing initiatives, taking a central role in brand management, advertising, public relations, product development, and sales support. She also led the company’s digital marketing efforts, managing online communication channels including the corporate website, branded blogs, and digital content campaigns. This work provided firsthand insights into how consumers engage with brands in online environments, sparking her enduring interest in digital platforms and user experience. In addition, she directed several high-impact projects, such as organizing national and international exhibitions and overseeing a full corporate brand renewal.

She later joined Eagon Group, a company founded in 1972 and well known in South Korea for its commitment to sustainable architectural materials and design-driven innovation. The company is also recognized for its long-standing contribution to society through cultural and artistic initiatives—most notably the Eagon Concert, a flagship classical music program promoting public engagement with the arts. At Eagon, she focused on communication strategy and public outreach, participating in marketing projects that integrated cultural and social values—such as the company’s long-running Eagon Concert, a flagship classical music program for public audiences.

These roles equipped her with practical insights into how marketing operates across physical and digital spaces, shaping the foundation for her subsequent academic focus on platform behavior and user engagement.

Hyunhee Woo’s dissertation investigates how unstructured consumer-generated content—such as text and images—can be integrated into quantitative marketing models to better understand and predict consumer behavior. The dissertation comprises three empirical essays.

Essay 1 investigates the impact of review quality—measured through a construct called aspect richness—on movie box office revenue. Aspect richness captures the prominence and structural complexity of product aspects mentioned in online reviews. Using data from 410 movies released between March 2013 and February 2019, this study analyzes weekly box office revenue alongside IMDb review data. A domain-specific aspect dictionary was developed using word embeddings and clustering techniques, and the Mahalanobis distance was employed to incorporate interdependencies among aspect dimensions. Results indicate that aspect richness is positively associated with both the number of helpful votes and box office performance. Moreover, aspect richness strengthens the positive impact of review volume on revenue, while mitigating the negative influence of rating variance. The influence of review quality extends beyond theatrical release, showing continued effects on subsequent Blu-ray sales.

Essay 2 investigates how interior design style influences property demand on a home-sharing platform. The study uses data from 562 Airbnb listings across 28 U.S. cities and evaluates the effects of key listing attributes—such as location, host service, facility quality, and price—alongside home style. The empirical results show that home style significantly affects booking demand and interacts with other attributes such as host quality and price. To identify stylistic characteristics, the study integrates unstructured data sources, extracting visual features from listing photos and linguistic cues from 6.7 million guest reviews using word embedding techniques. Variables related to shape and color, derived from image data, are found to be significant predictors of demand. Moreover, review-based mentions of modern style show a statistically significant positive association with demand, whereas references to classic or traditional style tend to have a negative effect.

Essay 3 explores how ride-sharing platforms affect review behavior on a home-sharing platform, leveraging Uber’s temporary withdrawal from Austin, Texas, as a natural experiment. Using a combination of propensity score matching and difference-in-differences estimation, the study finds that both the valence and helpfulness of Airbnb reviews increased during Uber’s absence from the market. These effects vary by location: the impact on review valence is stronger for listings in less accessible areas, while the effect on review helpfulness is more pronounced for properties in more centrally located neighborhoods.

The dissertation was supervised by Prof. Shijin Yoo and reviewed by a committee consisting of Prof. Chan Su Park, Prof. Kwanho Suk, and Prof. Weon Sang Yoo from Korea University, and Prof. Ji Hee Song from the University of Seoul. Their support and guidance provided essential academic and methodological direction throughout the research process.