In merely two decades, China transformed from a digital newcomer to the world's largest e-commerce market, with 800 million users and nearly 50% of global retail sales. In From Click to Boom, Lizhi Liu unveils the surprising forces behind this extraordinary growth, tackling a key question in political economy: How can states build essential market institutions when formal institutions are lacking? Contrary to conventional wisdom, Liu argues, China's e-commerce market boom occurred partly because of weak government institutions, not despite them. Gaps in government institutions compelled e-commerce platforms to build powerful private institutions for contract enforcement, fraud detection, and dispute resolution. For a surprisingly long period, the authoritarian government acquiesced, endorsed, and even partnered with this private institutional building — a phenomenon Liu calls "institutional outsourcing." Drawing on extensive interviews, original surveys, tens of millions of proprietary data, and a field experiment across three Chinese provinces, Liu shows that the resulting e-commerce boom had far-reaching effects on China, offering fresh insights with implications for emerging markets worldwide.

Lizhi Liu is an Assistant Professor in the McDonough School of Business and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Government at Georgetown University. Her research specializes in political economy and emerging markets. Her work has been published by American Economic Review: Insights, Studies in Comparative International Development, Minnesota Law Review, Oxford University Press, and Princeton University Press. In particular, her research on the political economy of China's e-commerce market has garnered multiple research awards and grants. In 2021, she was honored as one of Poets&Quants Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professors.