How to Respond to Help Requests in Marketing Campaigns on Social Network Sites: A Communication Privacy Management Perspective

SNSs are becoming a preferred venue to conduct marketing campaigns to promote brands, products, and services. Therefore, it is imperative for merchants and SNS providers to substantively understand individual users’ response to help requests in a marketing campaign in SNSs. Drawing on the communication privacy management theory and privacy calculus perspective, this paper examines the main and interaction effects of privacy assurance from a merchant and relationship closeness with a sender on a recipient’s participation behaviors through the recipient’s privacy assessments in terms of privacy concerns and social rewards. A lab- controlled experiment was proposed to test the hypotheses in this short paper. A pilot study of 43 subjects confirmed the validity of experiment setting, and shows preliminary strong evidences to support the proposed hypotheses. Both theoretical and practical implications of the findings are expected

Can Telling a Story Work? Understanding Answer Adoption Behavior in Online Q&A Communities from a Heuristic-Systematic Perspective

Online question-and-answer (Q&A) communities have been emerging as knowledge acquisition platforms. This study develops a heuristic-systematic model (HSM) to investigate the effects of systematic and heuristic cues on answer adoption behaviors, where the writing style in terms of narrative or non-narrative structure is proposed as a novel heuristic cue. It also firstly presents that recipient expertise will moderate the impact of systematic and heuristic cues differently. Preliminary experiments are conducted based on Q&A data collected from Zhihu.com. The results demonstrate that narrative answers significantly facilitate adoption behaviors, and viewer expertise negatively moderates this impact. The results also verify the positive impacts of other two selected systematic (answer completeness) and heuristic (answer helpfulness votes) cues, but the moderating effects of viewer expertise have not been well observed. This study contributes to enriching the interpretation mechanism of online Q&A adoption behaviors and provides practical insights for enhancing user engagement in online communities

A polar codes-based distributed UEP scheme for the internet of things

The Internet of Things (IoT), which is expected to support a massive number of devices, is a promising communication scenario. Usually, the data of different devices has different reliability requirements. Channel codes with the unequal error protection (UEP) property are rather appealing for such applications. Due to the power-constrained characteristic of the IoT services, most of the data has short packets; therefore, channel codes are of short lengths. Consequently, how to transmit such nonuniform data from multisources efficiently and reliably becomes an issue be solved urgently. To address this issue, in this paper, a distributed coding scheme based on polar codes which can provide UEP property is proposed. The distributed polar codes are realized by the groundbreaking combination method of noisy coded bits. With the proposed coding scheme, the various data from multisources can be recovered with a single common decoder. Various reliability can be achieved; thus, UEP is provided. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed coding scheme is viable

Regulation of Irregular Neuronal Firing by Autaptic Transmission

The importance of self-feedback autaptic transmission in modulating spike-time irregularity is still poorly understood. By using a biophysical model that incorporates autaptic coupling, we here show that self-innervation of neurons participates in the modulation of irregular neuronal firing, primarily by regulating the occurrence frequency of burst firing. In particular, we find that both excitatory and electrical autapses increase the occurrence of burst firing, thus reducing neuronal firing regularity. In contrast, inhibitory autapses suppress burst firing and therefore tend to improve the regularity of neuronal firing. Importantly, we show that these findings are independent of the firing properties of individual neurons, and as such can be observed for neurons operating in different modes. Our results provide an insightful mechanistic understanding of how different types of autapses shape irregular firing at the single-neuron level, and they highlight the functional importance of autaptic self-innervation in taming and modulating neurodynamics.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figure