Pricing or Advertising? A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Online Retailing

How should online retailers attract customers? Should they advertise intensively to attract online traffic, or should they simply price lower than their competitors? To answer these questions, we develop a game-theoretic model of two firms choosing advertising levels and prices strategically. We find that only asymmetric equilibria exist, where e-tailers choose different strategies along both advertising and pricing dimensions. When market mobility is low (i.e., the majority of buyers have high search costs), firms engage in fierce competition in advertising, and the firm with a higher advertising level charges a higher price and earns higher profits. When market mobility is high (i.e., the majority of buyers have zero search costs) or medium, one firm may choose to advertise intensely while the other may choose to charge a lower price and not advertise at all. In such cases, either firm may make higher profits. We also compare the market outcome in our model to the case in which firms do not have the option of advertising and find that the option to advertise leads to higher expected prices. We further extend the model to consider e-tailers choosing advertising levels sequentially

Membership Free Shipping Programs: Effect on Competition and Optimality of Member Fees

Fee-based membership free shipping is an important shipping fee schedule in E-Commerce. This paper studies how the membership free shipping (MFS) program affects firm competition and how to set the membership fee optimally. We find MFS relaxes price competition. The firm that adopts MFS has a higher pricing band than the other firm. Both firms have positive profits, strictly better than when membership free shipping is not a choice. The MFS firm subsidizes subscribers, so the subscribers always have a lower average total cost (price plus shipping fee) per order. The MFS firm could still earn a higher profit than the other firm, although the MFS firm\u27s profit excluding membership fee is lower than that of the other firm. The paper also characterizes how to set the optimal membership fee and shows that an intermediate percentage of subscribers is optimal for the firm that adopts the free shipping program

SOCIAL PREFERENCES AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Open source software (OSS), and open innovation in general, has received increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners. Based on recent literature on social preference from behavior economics, we propose a finite-horizon dynamic model to study the interactions between OSS developers who are either purely self-interested or conditional cooperators. We find that selfinterested developers who are predicted to free ride under conventional analysis may contribute to a public good, and the existence of purely these developers may, under certain conditions, even benefit the provision of a public good. We further analyze how code architecture affects OSS development outcome and propose that a higher level of code modularity leads to more code contributions overall, due to the strategic behavior of self-interested developers. However, a right mix of the two types of developers plays a critical role for modular design to make an impact. The findings bear important theoretical as well as practical implications and provide guidelines for OSS development and the collective innovation in general

CODE ARCHITECTURE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

A model is developed to study how the code architecture affects open source software (OSS) development. The model incorporates the resource heterogeneity and diverse motivations of various groups of programmers as well as the strategic interactions among them. We argue that the major advantage brought by a modular architecture of OSS code base is that it reduces both the cognitive cost and the coordination cost associated with OSS development, thus allowing programmers more easily to locate, manage, and contribute to the code base. We show that in OSS development, while modular architecture can potentially increase code contribution, it does not necessarily reduce free-riding; in fact it may well increase free-riding due to the strategic interactions among the programmers. We further empirically test the predictions using the SourceForge OSS development data, and the results confirm our theoretical predictions. The findings bear important theoretical as well as practical implications and provide guidelines for practitioners of OSS development and the collective innovation in general

An Identity Perspective on Online Healthcare Communities

Online healthcare communities often experience high churn rates. Our study investigates this phenomenon by integrating the concepts of social stigma, psychological capital, and social identity. Based on survey data from an online community serving lymphoma patients, we found that 1) users’ positive social identity increased their participation and recommendation intentions through enhanced psychological capital empowered by the online community; 2) stigmatized social identity hampered participation and recommendation intentions through decreased psychological capital; 3) users’ personal identity moderated the mediated impacts of positive and stigmatized social identities on participation and recommendation intentions through psychological capital, and 4) participation intention positively influenced recommendation intention. Our study applied the identity theory with a novel approach and offered insights on the development and management of online healthcare communities for both researchers and practitioners

Teacher Questioning in College English Class: A Guide to Critical Thinking

Amidst the great revolution in China s education system promoting critical thinking in school education to prepare students for the needs of modern world has been advocated by more and more educators Critical thinking is a learned skill that needs to be cultivated by effective instruction Research suggest that teacher questioning plays an important role in promoting students critical thinking through classroom interaction This article reviews literature on how critical thinking relates to teacher questioning instructional approach and advocates effective use of teacher questioning technique in college English class to actively engage students in the learning process and guide them to critical thinkin

Assessing Junior Faculty Research Productivity in the IS Field: Recommendations for Promotion and Tenure Standards for Asian Schools

We gathered information about junior faculty research productivity in the information systems (IS) field in North America and in a set of top Asian schools. Our work complements prior studies on IS faculty research productivity in several ways. First, we focused on junior faculty research productivity, which refers to publication records of current tenure-track assistant professors. To provide statistics with a greater coverage of IS researchers, we also collected information about the pre-tenure publication records of associate professors. Second, we covered IS researchers who obtained their doctoral degrees in or after the year 2000 and counted their publications until 2013 to provide the most up-to-date information about junior faculty research productivity. Third, we collected information about IS researchers’ publications in leading IS journals (based on the AIS Senior Scholar basket of journals) and in elite broader business journals (based on the Financial Times list and UT Dallas list). Finally, examining junior faculty research productivity in the IS field in Asian schools and in North America enabled us to provide recommendations for promotion and tenure standards for Asian schools in light of the research productivity and tenure standards in North America

Preparation and biomedical application of a non-polymer coated superparamagnetic nanoparticle

We report the preparation of a non-polymer coated superparamagnetic nanoparticle that is stable and biocompatible both in vitro and in vivo. The non-polymer, betaine, is a natural methylating agent in mammalian liver with active surface property. Upon systemic administration, the nanoparticle has preferential biodistribution in mammalian liver and exhibits good reduction of relaxivity time and negative enhancement for the detection of hepatoma nodules in rats using MRI. Our data demonstrate that the non-polymer coated superparamagnetic nanoparticle should have potential applications in biomedicine