Tale of Two Green Communities: Energy Informatics and Social Competition on Energy Conservation Behavior

This study explores whether providing information on energy consumption is effective in changing energyconsumption behavior. More specifically, in groups with collectivist culture, energy informatics have a significantrole in inducing active participation and engagement in energy conservation efforts. Using data collected fromenergy monitoring competitions conducted in student residence halls of a university, I find that energy competitionhas positive influence in reducing energy consumption for cohesive dorms, whereas it has adverse effect for lesscohesive ones . The findings of the study indicate suggest that the role of information on the energy saving isconditional on existing culture in communities. I discuss the managerial implications of the findings

ONLINE NETWORKS AND PROSOCIAL BEHAVIORS: EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF CHARITABLE DONATIONS AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY

My dissertation seeks to understand how online networks promote prosocial behaviors in creating social value. The first essay examines the use of Twitter on charitable giving behavior in online fundraising campaigns. Using a unique dataset from one of the first nonprofit organizations to conduct an online fundraising campaign via Twitter, the goal of this essay is to understand how social media and the interpersonal communications it facilitates influences donation outcomes. I find that generic content sent through a mass broadcast mode has a negative influence, whereas personalized content sent through a narrowcast mode has a positive influence on a focal agent's donation behavior. I further show that different types of persuasive content have varied impacts on outcomes. In the interpersonal context, content related to maintaining social relationships such as the visibility of other members' donations, the diversity of sources advocating action, and strengthening interpersonal bonds, positively influence donation behavior, especially for those whose social ties with the charitable organization are weak. The second essay examines the design of online communities in supporting grassroots movements towards environmental sustainability. Using a dataset from one of the early pioneers of "green" online communities, the goal of this essay is to understand how online networks impact sustainable behaviors. Drawing from literature on observational learning and environmental sustainability, I show that a member's total carbon savings is mainly influenced by the exposure to relevant others' "green" behaviors. More specifically, a member's decision to commit and perform a sustainable act is determined by the organizational structure and strength of relationships with fellow members. While organizing members into groups decreases individual's environmental effectiveness in terms of total carbon savings, especially in larger groups, a higher frequency of communications among members increases sustainable behavior by enhancing interpersonal connections. Overall, the two studies provide important theoretical and practical implications for prosocial behaviors supported by online networks

Spendthrift Trusts: The Tension Between Testamentary Freedom and Public Policy Concerns

In 1875, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Miller delivered the opinion of the court in a case pertaining to the construction of a woman’s trust created for her children. The matter focused on a provision in the testamentary trust that stated that the trust would terminate with respect to a son’s interest if he were to go bankrupt or insolvent, and that the resulting funds were to be collected by the trustees. Despite arguments presented to the court about how this inclusion acted as an attempt to evade notions of bankruptcy law, Justice Miller upheld the provision of the trust. This post was originally published on the Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights and Social Justice website on March 27, 2023. The original post can be accessed via the Archived Link button above

Nanostructured exchange coupled hard / soft composites: from the local magnetization profile to an extended 3D simple model

In nanocomposite magnetic materials the exchange coupling between phases plays a central role in the determination of the extrinsic magnetic properties of the material: coercive field, remanence magnetization. Exchange coupling is therefore of crucial importance in composite systems made of magnetically hard and soft grains or in partially crystallized media including nanosized crystallites in a soft matrix. It has been shown also to be a key point in the control of stratified hard / soft media coercive field in the research for optimized recording media. A signature of the exchange coupling due to the nanostructure is generally obtained on the magnetization curve $M(H)$ with a plateau characteristic of the domain wall compression at the hard/soft interface ending at the depinning of the wall inside the hard phase. This compression / depinning behavior is clearly evidenced through one dimensional description of the interface, which is rigorously possible only in stratified media. Starting from a local description of the hard/soft interface in a model for nanocomposite system we show that one can extend this kind of behavior for system of hard crystallites embedded in a soft matrix.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures. To be published in the Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials. (To be found at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/03048853

What Do Patients Want? Medical Expertise vis-a-vis Peer Support: Visitor Behaviors in Healthcare Social Infomediaries

Social infomediaries (online infomediaries that employ social technologies) have become an integral part of electronic commerce environments, in which consumers and service providers search and find each other, for improved market efficiency. We extend the role of social infomediaries in healthcare context, connecting patients and doctors. This study presents a new typology of visitor behaviors in healthcare social infomediaries. Our thereotical framework draws from online community and online shopping behaviors literature to explore and define different types of visitors. Using a cross-sectional data set from a social infomediary where patients and doctors discuss elective medical procedures and patients review doctors, we classify visitor behaviors in terms of the primary objective of participation, as either information or community seeking, and three increasing levels of purchase intention of elective medical procedures, creating a three-by-two matrix of visitor behaviors. For each type, we analyze user-generated content contribution in terms of activity type (consultation, question, review, and comment), level (high or low), and concentration of popular topics. The completed study will include a validation of our typology to estimate conversation rates and business values of each type to sustainability of social infomediaries

Semantic and Sentiment Dissonant Framing Effects on Online News Sharing

Information artifacts incorporate cognitive elements in their design to inform users about and entice them to consume relevant content. Sparse research has examined how to design cognitive elements in information artifacts in the digital news platforms context. This study investigates how information artifacts’ semantic and sentiment elements convey meaning and emotion to elicit users to share online news. We propose a dissonant framework and hypothesize that three dissonance dimensions (namely, semantic dissonance, textual sentiment dissonance, and visual sentiment dissonance) influence news sharing. We tested the hypotheses using real-world data from 2013 to 2015 from Mashable—a popular digital news platform. We used novel machine-learning techniques to extract topics and sentiments from text and photos in news articles. Findings from our econometric analysis support that textual sentiment and visual sentiment dissonance positively affect news sharing