2,366 research outputs found
The Long-term and Short-term Effects of Product Competition on Supply Abundance in an E-commerce Platform
Previous research suggested that both demand stimulation and extrusion effects appeared at an e-commerce platform due to the intense competition for sellers. On the one hand, market competition implies more market opportunities. On the other hand, it also attracts more customers (such as through low price and promoting) and creates network effect obviously on the demand side, which stimulates more products to enter the platform. The seemingly contradictory views were rarely observed and examined from time series analysis in previous studies. In this paper, both the long-term and short-term effects of product competition on the abundance of product supply were tested by using 140,000 outbound tour packaged products from Ctrip.com. FGLS was used to test the econometric model. The result shows that product competition will have a positive stimulating effect on the abundance of product supply in a short-term time window (about one month), but then there is a mixed effect of positive stimulus and negative extrusion, and finally, the effect gradually disappears. This paper provides an important policy implication for the e-commerce platforms to improve governance of product competition and effectively manage complementors and product categories
Crowdfunding Dynamics Tracking: A Reinforcement Learning Approach
Recent years have witnessed the increasing interests in research of
crowdfunding mechanism. In this area, dynamics tracking is a significant issue
but is still under exploration. Existing studies either fit the fluctuations of
time-series or employ regularization terms to constrain learned tendencies.
However, few of them take into account the inherent decision-making process
between investors and crowdfunding dynamics. To address the problem, in this
paper, we propose a Trajectory-based Continuous Control for Crowdfunding (TC3)
algorithm to predict the funding progress in crowdfunding. Specifically,
actor-critic frameworks are employed to model the relationship between
investors and campaigns, where all of the investors are viewed as an agent that
could interact with the environment derived from the real dynamics of
campaigns. Then, to further explore the in-depth implications of patterns
(i.e., typical characters) in funding series, we propose to subdivide them into
and ones. Moreover, for the
purpose of switching from different kinds of patterns, the actor component of
TC3 is extended with a structure of options, which comes to the TC3-Options.
Finally, extensive experiments on the Indiegogo dataset not only demonstrate
the effectiveness of our methods, but also validate our assumption that the
entire pattern learned by TC3-Options is indeed the U-shaped one
Field test on the biodegradation of poly(butylene adipate-co-terephthalate) based mulch films in soil
The use of plastic much films has been fundamental to promoting food production in many regions of the world. However, concern is growing about the progressive accumulation of plastic residues in soil after crop harvest and its subsequent impact on soil health and potential to enter the food chain. Although biodegradable films have been developed to prevent these problems, it is still unclear whether they are environmentally benign. Here we evaluated the physical and chemical breakdown of four commercial poly(butylene adipate-co-terephthalate) based biodegradable mulch films (BMF1, BMF2, BMF3 and BMF4) in an agricultural soil over a 26-month period. Based on visual examination, degradation followed the series BMF4Â >Â BMF1, BMF2Â >Â BMF3. Importantly, microplastic residues (fragments <5Â mm) still remained in the soil of all 4 plastic types after 2 years, suggesting that they are likely to accumulate over time if used on an annual basis. Viscosimetry, Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA) were used to characterise the breakdown process. Our results indicated that the degradation of the mulch film after burial in agricultural soil may be linked to the nature of the polymer but also to its manufacturing formulation. Although the peak changes of polyester in the infrared spectrum were not distinct, the plastic films showed other signs of degradation including a reduction in intrinsic viscosity after burial in soil. The different degradation rates of BMF1 and BMF2 at the molecular level may be due to the different CaCO3 contents. In conclusion, under field conditions, we show that slight variations in the formulations of commercial biodegradable mulch films leads to very different persistence rates in soil. Further, we conclude that their slow rate of degradation will ultimately lead to their progressive accumulation in soil if used repeatedly
Effect thresholds for the earthworm Eisenia fetida: Toxicity comparison between conventional and biodegradable microplastics
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