On 30 April 2026, Faculty of Finance at City University of Macau organized the fifteenth academic salon at the Golden Dragon Campus. This academic salon invited Dr. Wendong Zhang, an associate professor of Cornell University, as the speaker. He presented his paper titled “Product Innovation with Competing Sustainability Attributes: Welfare Effects and Asymmetric Consumer Responses”. Using experimental data from nearly a thousand consumers in the state of Kentucky, this study explores how competing sustainability attributes influence the market feasibility and welfare effects of new product innovation.

Dr. Zhang is an Associate Professor in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University. His research and extension program seeks to better understand U.S. farmland market, Chinese agriculture, as well as the interplay between agriculture and the environment. He is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation and was an Associate Editor of American Journal of Agricultural Economics from 2020 to 2023. From 2024 to 2027, he is serving as the Academic Vice President of the American Society of Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers (ASFMRA). He is also an Affiliated Faculty at Cornell Center for China Economic Research (CICER), a Faculty Fellow at Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and a Fellow (2023-2025) with the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF).

In this academic salon, Dr. Zhang shared his latest research findings with the Faculty of Finance, broadening the academic scope of the faculty in the fields of agricultural, environmental, and experimental economics. The Faculty of Finance Academic Salon at the City University of Macau is a platform for exchanging academic ideas and enhancing academic awareness. The Salon focuses on finance and economics, inviting experts from academia and the financial industry to discuss cutting-edge research and share industry development trends, aiming to bring new academic experiences and thinking models to the faculty and students of the university. Through academic activities like the academic salon, the Faculty of Finance provides a better academic platform for graduate students and encourage further exploration and research of academic issues among faculty and students.