A Stirring Effect of the Loss Leader Strategy in a Two-Sided Online Platform

Loss leader strategy refers to a pricing strategy in which sellers set much lower prices than the original ones for specific products to attract user attention. Similar to brick-and-mortar stores, online marketplaces often try to expose their platforms more visibly to potential buyers by offering a particular product at a lower price. Yet, the effects of the loss leader strategy on the online marketplaces is indeterminate and largely remains an empirical question due to distinguished characteristics of online marketplaces from the traditional retail setting. This study examines the effects of the loss leader strategy in the context of the two-sided online platform, focusing on the changes of both buying and selling sides after the introduction of loss leader. We collaborate with an online travel marketplace that introduced loss leaders (ticket products with lower price) to parts of sub-markets, providing a natural experimental setting for examining the effect of the loss leaders

The Mind Behind Crowdfunding: An Empirical Study of Speech Emotion in Fundraising Success

In online crowdfunding, individuals gather information from two primary sources, video pitches and text narratives. However, while the attributes of the attached video may have substantial effects on fundraising, previous literature has largely neglected effects of the video information. Therefore, this study focuses on speech information embedded in videos. Employing the machine learning techniques including speech recognition and linguistic style classifications, we examine the role of speech emotion and speech style in crowdfunding success, compared to that of text narratives. Using Kickstarter dataset in 2016, our preliminary results suggest that speech information –the linguistic styles– is significantly associated with the crowdfunding success, even after controlling for text and other project-specific information. More interestingly, linguistic styles of the speech have a more profound explanatory power than text narratives do. This study contributes to the growing body of crowdfunding research by providing the unexplored aspect of retrieving speech information from the video

Design and Validation of the Bright Internet

Bright Internet research was launched as a core project of the AIS Bright ICT Initiative, which aims to build an ICT-enabled Bright Society. To facilitate research on the Bright Internet, we explicitly define the goals and principles of the Bright Internet, and review the evolution of its principles. The three goals of the Bright Internet are: the realization of preventive security, the provision of the freedom of anonymous expression for innocent netizens, and protection from the risk of privacy infringement that may be caused by preventive security schemes. We respecify design principles to fulfill these seemingly conflicting goals: origin responsibility, deliverer responsibility, identifiable anonymity, global collaboration, and privacy protection. Research for the Bright Internet is characterized by two perspectives: first, the Bright Internet adopts a preventive security paradigm in contrast to the current self-centric defensive protective security paradigm. Second, the target of research is the development and deployment of the Bright Internet on a global scale, which requires the design of technologies and protocols, policies and legislation, and international collaboration and global governance. This research contrasts with behavioral research on individuals and organizations in terms of the protective security paradigm. This paper proposes validation research concerning the principles of the Bright Internet using prevention motivation theory and analogical social norm theory, and demonstrates the need for a holistic and prescriptive design for a global scale information infrastructure, encompassing the constructs of technologies, policies and global collaborations. An important design issue concerns the business model design, which is capable of promoting the propagation of the Bright Internet platform through applications such as Bright Cloud Extended Networks and Bright E-mail platforms. Our research creates opportunities for prescriptive experimental research, and the various design and behavioral studies of the Bright Internet open new horizons toward our common goal of a bright future

Are All Spillovers Created Equal? The Impact of Blockbusters and the Composition of Backers in Online Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding has emerged alongside the IT development. It is believed that overwhelmingly successful projects, blockbusters, would have significant impacts on the overall crowdfunding platform. However, there are notable limitations in previous studies. First, we consider how the advent of blockbusters impact according to the projects’ similarity with inside and outside clusters, rather than pre-determined category. Second, we examine the blockbusters’ heterogeneity with the type of backers that bring different effects. We use project-level dataset and apply novel clustering method to analyze blockbuster effects. We find empirical evidence that blockbusters have a spillover effect on same categories, especially inside clusters experience larger effects than outside clusters. In the long run, these spillover effects decay faster in outside clusters, but last long for inside cluster. Furthermore, this result changes according to the composition of backers. Our study presents a promising avenue for the application of semantic network analysis to the crowdfunding context

Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions

In online communities, antisocial behavior such as trolling disrupts constructive discussion. While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary people can engage in such behavior as well. We propose two primary trigger mechanisms: the individual's mood, and the surrounding context of a discussion (e.g., exposure to prior trolling behavior). Through an experiment simulating an online discussion, we find that both negative mood and seeing troll posts by others significantly increases the probability of a user trolling, and together double this probability. To support and extend these results, we study how these same mechanisms play out in the wild via a data-driven, longitudinal analysis of a large online news discussion community. This analysis reveals temporal mood effects, and explores long range patterns of repeated exposure to trolling. A predictive model of trolling behavior shows that mood and discussion context together can explain trolling behavior better than an individual's history of trolling. These results combine to suggest that ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, behave like trolls.Comment: Best Paper Award at CSCW 201

Essays on Information Technology and Market Dynamics: An Analysis of Media , Mobile and Platform Competitions

Information Systems and Managemen

A Multiyear Study of Smart Meter Adoption: Empirical Evidence from the United Kingdom

For tackling climate change and energy security, IT enabled connected systems are regarded as one of the most fundamental infrastructures for managing energy demand in the market. As these systems require to be connected to consumers via smart meters, adoption of smart meter has drawn huge attention from policymakers and researchers. However, little research has been based on the real-world market outcomes and only relies on responses in a single time window. Using a rich dataset on smart meter adoption in the UK between 2012 and 2016, we examine the effects of behavioral and household attributes on adoption of smart meter. The findings suggest that environmental concerns are negatively associated with smart meter adoption in contrast to general sustainable innovations. We also find that the determinants of overall adoption and conditional adoption differ significantly, and the effects change as the product become prevalent. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed

Do Token Incentives Work? An Empirical Study in a Ride-Hailing Platform

With the spread of the blockchain economy, incentives enabled by crypto tokens will compensate for more desirable activities that have been unpaid or underpaid in the past. Given the fact that crypto tokens are theoretically known as an inexpensive means of incentivization, this study provides some of the first empirical evidence to validate the practical effectiveness of token incentives. We use internal data from a ride-hailing company which recently initiated a unique token incentive program to compensate their drivers for prosocial performance. Using a difference-in-differences method to exploit the natural experiment, we find that token-incentivized drivers significantly increase the number of finished trips but maintain the number of cancellations at the same time. Through a subgroup analysis, we also find that tokens have greater incentive effects among early platform participants, while no difference between token-incentivized and non-incentivized drivers among late participants turns out. Our results establish that token incentives can certainly induce loyal participants to improve their behaviors and resolve stubborn problems in a traditional platform

Gender Economy in Live Streaming: Moderating Effects of Relational Motivation on Viewer Contributions

Live streaming platforms such as Amazon’s Twitch and YouTube Live have rapidly grown by taking advantage of unprecedented real-time interactivity between content creators and viewers. While numerous researchers suggested that viewer-streamer interactions and relationships are significantly associated with viewer donation, which is the main business model of live streaming, the economic impact of these relationships has not been quantified perhaps due to a lack of relevant data. In this paper, we measured the impact of cross-gender relationships between viewers and streamers on viewer contributions by using a rich dataset from the largest live streaming platform in South Korea. After controlling several viewer- and streamer-specific characteristics, we found that viewers donate larger amount of money to the opposite gender streamers by 4.4 percent than the same gender streamers. We also revealed that relational motivation positively moderates preferences for the opposite gender. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed