Falling from Digital Grace: Participation in Online Software Contests Following Loss of Status

We focus on the effects of status loss on decisions to participate in subsequent contests in online coding platform. We advance the relevant literature in several ways. First, by considering the effects of status loss on resource expenditure, we depart from the prior status literature, which has predominantly looked at performance implications of the status loss. Second, because of the voluntary nature of online contests, we demonstrate how the effects of status loss manifest when permanent exit or abstention is possible. This aspect marks another departure from situations common to the prior work, wherein work demands persist regardless of status changes. Lastly, recognizing that status changes may be endogenous to one\u27s past resource expenditure, we study exogenous variation in status, exploiting a natural experiment wherein status assignments were adjusted overnight by the platform operator, in a manner completely independent of individuals\u27 prior activities, resulting in sudden loss of statu

An Empirical Examination of Users’ Information Hiding in a Crowdfunding Context

Online privacy remains an ongoing source of debate in society. Sensitive to this, many web platforms are offering users greater, more granular control over how and when their information is revealed. However, recent research suggests that information control mechanisms of this sort are not necessarily of economic benefit to the parties involved. We examine these mechanisms and their economic consequences, leveraging data from one of the world\u27s largest global crowdfunding platforms, where contributors can conceal their identity or contribution amounts from public display. We find that information hiding is more likely when contributors are under greater scrutiny or exhibiting “undesirable” behavior. We also identify an anchoring effect from prior contributions, which is eliminated when earlier contributors conceal their amounts. Subsequent analyses indicate that a nuanced approach to the design and provision of information control mechanisms, such as varying default settings based on contribution amounts, can help promote larger contributions

Anonymity and Language Usage: A Natural Experiment of Social Network Integration

The Internet creates an anonymous and non-authoritarian environment where people do not have social inhibitions and can express opinions freely. However, such disinhibition at times leads to abusive use of language and uncivil behavior in the online environment. This paper leverages data from a natural experiment on an online review platform that integrated social network platform personalization features, which exposes users in an anonymous environment to a social environment. Interestingly, our preliminary findings show that after the social network platform integration, users express more emotions (specifically, they become more positive but less negative), are less likely to use inappropriate language that include sexually explicit words or words that shows rage. Further, users are less egocentric and more social in their language use. We discuss the implication of this study for creating a civil online environment

Dynamic Voice Clones Elicit Consumer Trust

Platforms today are experimenting with many novel personalization technologies. We explore one such technology here, voice-based conversational agents, with a focus on consumer trust. We consider the joint role of two key design / implementation choices, namely i) disclosing an agent’s autonomous nature to the user, and ii) aesthetic personalization, in the form of user voice cloning. We report on a set of controlled experiments based on the investment game, evaluating how these design choices affect subjects’ willingness to participate in the game against an autonomous, AI-enabled partner. We find no evidence that disclosure affects trust. However, we find that the greatest level of trust is elicited when a voice-based agent employs a clone of the subject’s voice. Mechanism explorations based on post-experiment survey responses indicate that voice-cloning induces trust by eliciting a perception of homophily; the voice-clone induces subjects to personify the agent and picture it as demographically similar

DIGITAL INNOVATION AND CRAFTSMANSHIP: THE CASE OF C. F. MARTIN & COMPANY

Craftsmanship is a concept often left unaddressed in the IT innovation literature. Further, this literature often fails to consider innovation that involves human labor on the shop floor. With the sheer volume of organizations that operate in craft-based industries, placing a strident focus upon craftsmanship and predominantly innovating on the shop floor, this is particularly concerning. This work therefore examines the influence of considered craftsmanship on the nature and consequences of digital innovation in the guitar manufacturing process at C. F. Martin & Company. We propose a model of innovation that incorporates the concept of the activity system, drawn from the field of activity theory. Individual innovations cause disturbances in actor-tooltask relationships (activity systems). This drives a series of reconfigurations, in an effort to eliminate said disturbances. Preliminary qualitative evidence is provided, supporting the proposed model, in the form of a series of semi-structured interviews

An Empirical Examination of the Antecedents and Consequences of Investment Patterns in Crowd-Funded Markets.

Crowd-funded markets have recently emerged as a novel source of capital for entrepreneurs. As the economic potential of these markets is now being realized, they are beginning to go mainstream, a trend reflected by the explicit attention crowdfunding has received in the American Jobs Act as a potential avenue for economic growth, as well as the recent focus that regulators such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have placed upon it. Although the formulation of regulation and policy surrounding crowd-funded markets is becoming increasingly important, the behavior of crowdfunders, an important aspect that must be considered in this formulation effort, is not yet well understood. A key factor that can influence the behavior of crowd funders is information on prior contribution behavior, including the amount and timing of others\u27 contributions, which is published for general consumption. With that in mind, in this study, we empirically examine social influence in a crowd-funded marketplace for online journalism projects, employing a unique data set that incorporates contribution events and Web traffic statistics for approximately 100 story pitches. This data set allows us to examine both the antecedents and consequences of the contribution process. First, noting that digital journalism is a form of public good, we evaluate the applicability of two competing classes of economic models that explain private contribution toward public goods in the presence of social information: substitution models and reinforcement models. We also propose a new measure that captures both the amount and the timing of others\u27 contribution behavior: contribution frequency (dollars per unit time). We find evidence in support of a substitution model, which suggests a partial crowding-out effect, where contributors may experience a decrease in their marginal utility from making a contribution as it becomes less important to the recipient. Further, we find that the duration of funding and, more importantly, the degree of exposure that a pitch receives over the course of the funding process, are positively associated with readership upon the story\u27s publication. This appears to validate the widely held belief that a key benefit of the crowdfunding model is the potential it offers for awareness and attention-building around causes and ventures. This last aspect is a major contribution of the study, as it demonstrates a clear linkage between marketing effort and the success of crowd-funded projects

Culture, Conformity, and Emotional Suppression in Online Reviews

In this study, we examine consumers’ cultural background as an antecedent of online review characteristics. We theoretically propose and empirically examine the effect of cultural background (specifically individualism (versus collectivism)) on consumers’ tendency to conform to prior opinion and review texts’ emotionality. We also examine how conformity and emotionality relate to review helpfulness. We test our hypotheses using a unique dataset that combines online restaurant reviews from TripAdvisor with measures of individualism/collectivism values. We found that consumers from a collectivist culture were less likely to deviate from the average prior rating and to express emotion in their reviews. Moreover, individuals perceived those reviews that exhibited high conformity and intense emotions to be less helpful. We also present several important implications for managing online review platforms in light of these findings, which reflect the previously unidentified drivers of systematic differences in the characteristics of online reviews

Online Review Censorship

Ample anecdotal evidence in the media notes that many businesses seek to ‘silence’ negative reviews, e.g., via legal threat. Despite attention toward this issue, we are aware of no systematic analyses addressing it. We address that gap here, leveraging review data from TripAdvisor.com. First, we estimate that ~1% of truthful reviews are deleted within six months of posting and that negative reviews are significantly more likely to be deleted, consistent with a mechanism of censorship. The effect is substantial; we estimate that a 1-star decrease in rating valence is associated with an approximate 25% (0.25pp) increase in the probability of deletion. Second, we examine how freedom of expression (FoE) in a country associates with characteristics of (uncensored) online reviews. We find that FoE associates with larger review volumes, lower review valence, and faster review posting. We discuss implications for online ratings platforms, consumers, and research opportunities