Angela Ziyan Xiao

Biography

Angela earned her PhD in Marketing from Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University in 2025. Her research mainly focuses on consumer goals and motivation, such as goal setting, planning, goal-related purchases, sustaining motivation, and exercising self-control. She is also interested in the social aspects of consumer behavior, and has explored topics such as information disclosure and social norms. Her current projects include how unpacking tasks affect consumer goal planning, and how ideal selves and aspirations can lead to suboptimal purchases that tend to be underused. Her primary research methods are lab and field experiments, but she has also incorporated interactive experiments, web scraping and large language models, and economic models into her work.

Education

Ph.D., Marketing, Carnegie Mellon University, 2025

M.S., Marketing, Carnegie Mellon University, 2022

B.S., Psychology, Tsinghua University, 2020