Title: Impact of Real-World Events on Virtual Behavior: The Case of Sports Video Games

Speaker: Yong Liu

Time: November 13^th, 2025 (Thursdy) 9:30

Venue: 405, School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology

Organizer: School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology

Guest Bio:
Associate Dean, Eller College of Management

Dean, HSLopez School of Business Analytics

HSLopez Endowed Chair Professor

Professor of Marketing

  Professor Yong Liu is a leading scholar in the business field at the University of Arizona (UA) and a distinguished authority in business analytics with extensive practical experience. As a top-tier quantitative analyst specializing in customer insights and business strategy, Professor Liu has consistently leveraged precise data analysis as the core engine for exploring critical pathways to business growth in the digital era since joining the Eller College of Management in 2006. His research spans cutting-edge domains including digital marketing, innovative business model design, social interaction mechanisms, media strategy optimization, entertainment product marketing, and product hazard crisis and recall strategies. His findings not only provide high-value theoretical frameworks for solving real-world business challenges but also translate into actionable practical solutions, tangibly enhancing corporate market competitiveness.

  Prior to joining Eller, Professor Yong Liu dedicated himself to business education at Syracuse University. With his profound expertise and dynamic teaching style, he has successfully cultivated generations of outstanding business professionals equipped with both systematic theoretical knowledge and exceptional practical capabilities, contributing invaluable expertise to the industry. His distinguished academic journey began at the globally renowned University of British Columbia, where he pursued his PhD in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing. This rigorous academic foundation laid the cornerstone for decades of subsequent scholarly research and teaching excellence.

Synopsis:

  The video game industry and virtual goods market have experienced rapid growth. This paper examines a unique but unexplored relationship in video games: whether and how real-world events affect virtual-world behavior and how this relationship provides business opportunities to video game developers and marketers. Based on individual-level user data for a major sports video game, I analyze the effects of real-world events occurring in the professional sports league, which is the backdrop of the video game, on the users’ game play through panel fixed effects models. We find that the real-world game outcomes significantly affect the likelihood of video game playing. We further analyze sports league news and find that some real-world events also impact video game play. Scholars, managers, designers, and investors who are interested video games and virtual goods will find these results interesting.