Gamified System Effectiveness on Social Trading Platforms

To motivate user engagement and generate desired engagement outcomes, some social trading platforms have introduced gamified systems with hierarchical badges and financial incentives. However, previous studies have not examined the effectiveness of such an application. Based on data collected from a popular social trading platform, eToro, we empirically examine the effectiveness of the gamified system and its mechanism. Results indicate that the gamified system under social trading is effective in inducing user-to-user and user-to-system interactions, thus leading to some desired engagement outcomes on social media. However, the gamified system does not contribute to the engagement outcomes on financial investment. Our paper contributes to the literature on both gamification and social trading, highlighting gamification’s important practical implications for platform managers, cautioning against the possible ineffectiveness of the dual-outcome gamified system and shedding light on the design of gamified systems

Can Touch Interaction Predict Product-Related Emotion? A Study on Mobile Augmented Reality

The advancement in immersive technologies provides online retailers the opportunity to integrate augmented reality (AR) experience for their customers. Using AR, the online product presentation is transformed from the pictorial representation to virtual interaction with the products. The virtual product interaction facilitates online retailers to detect product-related emotion through affective computing. For mobile AR, customers use touch gestures for virtual interaction. Using the theories related to immersive media and affective computing, we hypothesize that the touch movements and touch pressure in AR-based mobile applications are related to positive emotion during product interaction. Moreover, we describe a methodology to establish our hypotheses and to show that these variables can predict the product-related emotion. We expect our research findings to have both theoretical and practical implications. It will explain why touch behavior can predict product-related emotion, and it will also demonstrate online retailers how to implement emotion analytics in AR shopping applications

An Economic Analysis of the Online Counterfeit Market and the Impact of Anti-Counterfeit Technology

Counterfeiting causes hundreds of billions dollars of losses around the world every year. Due to the growing prominence of online commerce, the seriousness of the situation could soon become much worse. Hence, reaching a clear understanding of the fundamental economic incentives behind this practice is of vital importance. In this paper, we investigate a problem within which a firm selling acounterfeit product engages in price competition with a firm that sells an authentic product to a population of heterogeneous consumers. An online intermediary acts as the facilitator of both firms’ transactions and may consequently be liable for any counterfeit sales. We use a stylized model to explain the economic incentives and the equilibrium behaviors of both firms and of the intermediary. More specifically, we seek to understand the effects of anti-counterfeit technology and anti-counterfeit policies on both firms’ pricing strategies and profits, as well as on the intermediary’s profit, consumer surplus and social welfare. Conclusions of this paper can provide managerial implications on how to effectively handle the online counterfeit problem

Computational modeling of artificial economic agents\u27 trading behaviors in a synthetic stock market

This purpose of this study is to investigate trading behaviors in the synthetic stock market. An agent-based computational economic simulation is used to examine the impact of changes in different parameters on the trading behavior and welfare of market participants. This approach allows for the consideration of the evolutionary characteristics of the agents, as the framework is driven by feedback from evolving market environments. There are three chapters in this thesis. First, we look at the overconfident behavior. Next, we study the disposition effects in agents and lastly we study the memory effects on agent behavior. Overconfident behaviors are characterized by people\u27s tendency to overestimate their ability to make correct decisions because they overestimate the significance of their private information. The disposition effect, a phenomenon first described by Shefrin and Statman (1985), involves investors “selling winners too soon and holding losers for too long.” In essence, an investor (agent) exhibiting the disposition effect, referred to as a disposition agent in this study, will be risk-averse when achieving gains and act in a risk-seeking manner when undergoing losses. We also analyze two cases of non-rational agents with no memory and with memory about market information in a market structure such that the true signal of the asset is revealed every few periods. Our study found that the more of the non-rational adaptive agents in the market and the more the positive private signals for non-rational adaptive agents, the greater the incidence of overconfident behaviors. In addition, market trends significantly affect the welfare of non-rational agents when they have negative market expectations. We also found the support for selling winners too soon in the market, but holding losers for too long was found to be undesirable for the disposition agents. Lastly, we learned that more memory does not necessarily translate into better performance. This is because non-rational agents have to adjust their strategies given additional information. Moreover, non-rational agents do not necessarily perform worse when true information is not revealed for longer periods

Do hacker forums contribute to security attacks?

There has been an increased amount of discussion about firms needing to account for the hacker's perspective in protecting their information assets. However, we still have very little idea about how attack information is disseminated within the hacker community. In this paper, we study the role of hacker forums in disseminating vulnerability information that leads to attacks. We found that the discussions in online hacker forums correlate significantly with the number of cyber-attacks observed in the real world. Furthermore, hacker forums also play a moderating role in disseminating vulnerability and threat information. As cyber security becomes an increasingly prominent issue for firms, our study indicates that there is a need to study the behaviors of the participants in the hacker forum further in order to better understand the risks that they pose. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND CYBER-AFFAIRS

The dark side of ICT usage has started receiving increasing attention in recent years. As the Internet allows anonymity, some individuals are making use of social dating websites to engage in extramarital cyber affairs. In this study, we investigate factors likely to mitigate people’s engagement in cyber affairs. We focus on the influence of religious beliefs by analysing US data over one year, drawn from a large dating website set up to facilitate married persons in establishing extramarital, offline companionships. Our main finding is that increased religiosity decreases cyber affair activities—after controlling other factors, the average expenses on cyber affairs by users from areas with more religious adherents becomes smaller. However, the mitigation effect weakens when religious rules concerning marriage are overly strict. Spending on cyber affair related activities is higher in countries with higher concentrations of Catholics relative to Protestants or Evangelical Christians. Further, entertainment facilities such as bars distract people from engaging in cyber affairs—expenses on cyber affair related activities actually decrease in counties with more bars. Our study provides several new insights into the relationship between religiosity and engagement in cyber affairs

What is Your Data Strategy? The Strategic Interactions in Data-Driven Advertising

The increasing demand of using data to generate insights has spawned the new data broker industry. Data brokers are playing an increasingly critical role in the data-driven advertising ecosystem. Motivated by this new phenomenon, we build an analytical model to analyze the interplay between the data broker’s data quality decision and the firm’s decisions on ads delivery choice and product pricing. We find that when the firm’s ads delivery capability vis-à-vis that of the data broker is either low or high, the data broker may offer high quality data to the firm. Interestingly, under some circumstances, the data broker may offer low quality data to the firm, incentivizing the latter to employ the former’s ads delivery service. This result suggests that data quality can be a strategic tool leveraged by the data broker to affect firm’s ads delivery choice. We discuss implications and provide future extensions