Much of my research studies how digital platforms reshape consumer behavior and markets, with a focus on the music industry. Recent projects ask whether attention on TikTok promotes or cannibalizes streaming, how a viral hit spills over onto other artists, and how activity on social media shapes the brands people buy.

A second strand develops measurement tools for marketing: methods that infer emotion in text from emojis (forthcoming at the Journal of Marketing), or that represent consumers and products as vectors in a shared space to recover individual preferences. I also bring causal methods to classic questions in retailing, such as how a product recall moves a retailer’s prices or how privacy regulation reshapes advertising. This work draws on representation learning, causal inference, and natural language processing applied to large-scale behavioral and text data.

I serve as an ad-hoc reviewer for the International Journal of Research in Marketing, and have held research visits at the NYU Stern School of Business (New York), Bocconi University (Milan), the University of New South Wales (Sydney), and Imperial College Business School (London).

Working papers

  • When Hits Hurt: Cross-Artist Spillovers and the Attention Economy in Streaming Music (with Nils Wlömert, and Eitan Muller) Does a viral hit lift or steal streaming attention from an artist’s other songs and from similar artists?
  • How Does a Product’s Recall Impact Its Retailer-Set Price? (with Marton Varga, Vivek Astvanash, and Abishek Borah) How does a product recall move the prices retailers set?
  • Privacy Regulations and Advertising in Offline Markets - Evidence from Randomized Field Experiments (with Alexandra Becker, Nils Wlömert, and Dominik Papies) Field experiments on how privacy regulation reshapes offline advertising.
  • The (Un)Professional Side of Human Brands: How Social Media Drives Brand Consumption (with Daniel Winkler, Nils Wlömert, and Harald Van Heerde) How do a human brand’s social-media posts drive brand consumption and engagement?
  • Beyond Upgrade Success: How Declined Subscription Requests Shape Subsequent Donation Behavior (with Pascal Güntürkün, and Sven Mikolon) How do declined subscription-upgrade requests shape later donation behavior?
  • Quantifying Consumer-Product Fit: A Representation Learning Approach (with Qiaoni Shi, Kai Zhu, and Angelo Cao) A representation-learning approach that places consumers and products in a shared space to recover individual preferences. SSRN

Publications & proceedings

  • Winkler, D., Hotz-Behofsits, C., Wlömert, N., Papies, D., & Liaukonytė, J. (2026). Does TikTok Promote or Cannibalize Music Streaming? Estimands and Identification with Heavy-Tailed Outcomes. Quantitative Marketing and Economics (forthcoming). Removing music from TikTok lowers streaming, with losses concentrated in viral songs; the estimated effect hinges on how heavy-tailed outcomes are modeled. SSRN Practitioner’s companion
  • Hotz-Behofsits, C., Wlömert, N., & Abou Nabout, N. (2025). Natural Affect Detection (NADE): Inferring emotional expression from text through emojis. Journal of Marketing (forthcoming). Infers emotion from text by translating it into emojis, going beyond positive/negative sentiment to eight distinct emotions. Explorer Python R
  • Hotz-Behofsits, C., Winkler, D., & Wlömert, N. (2022). Music Genres Reconsidered: Challenging Established Genres with a Data-driven Approach. Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). IEEE. Redraws music-genre boundaries from listening data rather than industry labels. PDF
  • Hotz‐Behofsits, C., Huber, F., & Zörner, T. O. (2018). Predicting cryptocurrencies using sparse non‐Gaussian state space models. Journal of Forecasting, 37(6), 627–640. Sparse, non-Gaussian state-space models sharpen cryptocurrency forecasts. PDF

Presentations & invited talks

2026

  • 48th ISMS Marketing Science Conference, Lisbon, Portugal — June 2026
  • 55th Conference of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC), Bath, United Kingdom — June 2026

2025

  • 47th ISMS Marketing Science Conference, Washington DC, USA — June 2025
  • European Quant Marketing Workshop, Virtual - May 2025
  • UNSW Research Seminar, Sydney, Australia — February 2025

2024

  • Bocconi Research Seminar, Milan, Italy — October 2024

2023

  • Symposium on the Special Issue on Marketing Impact with Research-Driven Apps in the Journal of Marketing — November 2023
  • 45th ISMS Marketing Science Conference, Miami, USA — June 2023
  • 3rd Marketing Analytics Symposium (MASS), Sydney, Australia — July 2023

2022

  • Economics of the Music Industry, Hamburg, Germany — December 2022
  • Bocconi Research Camp, Varese, Italy — October 2022
  • Marketing Research Seminar, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia — September 2022
  • 2nd Marketing Analytics Symposium (MASS), Sydney, Australia — July 2022

2021

  • 50th Conference of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC), virtual — May 2021

2020

  • 1st Marketing Analytics Symposium (MASS), Sydney, Australia — July 2020
  • 42nd ISMS Marketing Science Conference, virtual — June 2020

2019

  • 49th Conference of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC), Hamburg, Germany — May 2019
  • 40th ISMS Marketing Science Conference, Rome, Italy — June 2019

2018

  • 49th Conference of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC), Scotland, United Kingdom — May 2018

2017

  • 39th ISMS Marketing Science Conference, Los Angeles, USA — June 2017