About

I am Xu-hang, pronounced shee-hung, a second-year Quantitative Marketing PhD student at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. You are also welcome to call me Shawn. My research studies digital platforms, mobile marketing, behavioral targeting, and how the timing of platform interventions shapes consumer engagement.

Research
Not So Timely: Push-Notification Timing and User Engagement
Working Paper SSRN ↗
with Zachary Zhong, Xinlong Li, and Sihan Li

Question: If platforms can reach users at the exact moment they are active, should they? This paper shows why a little delay can outperform perfect immediacy.

The availability of granular user data allows digital platforms to time interventions with remarkable precision. However, does delivering messages exactly when a user is active truly maximize consumer response? We leverage a novel dataset from a leading push notification provider in China that captures the precise timestamps of screen-on events, inferred from mobile device app usage, and notification delivery. We exploit a quasi-experiment where a user's screen-on timing is effectively random relative to the push request within a short window, creating exogenous variation in the timing gap between screen-on and delivery. Regression discontinuity estimates reveal that, contrary to industry wisdom, immediate screen-on delivery backfires, reducing same-day app logins by approximately 16%. To isolate the effects of different lags, we instrument the realized delay using granular variations in screen-on timing. We find a non-monotonic pattern: users receiving notifications with a modest delay (1-6 minutes) after a screen-on event exhibit peak engagement, surpassing both instant delivery and longer lags. Heterogeneity analysis shows that this penalty for immediate interruption is most pronounced during high-stakes periods, such as weekday mornings. Suggestive evidence from a second live-streaming app and from longer-term outcomes, app uninstalls, is consistent with the main findings. These findings challenge the race for immediacy, suggesting that a modest delay balances intrusiveness against timeliness, making it a variable to optimize rather than an inefficiency to eliminate.
Keywords: Push Notifications, Behavioral Targeting, Delivery Timing, Mobile Marketing, Regression Discontinuity