Impacts of Online Reviews on IT-enabled Service Adoption: A Preliminary Evidence from Mobile Data Services

The advancement of social media technologies has enabled consumers to freely generate reviews online. These reviews are considered important in influencing consumer purchase decisions of various products. However, it is unclear how they affect the adoption of IT-enabled services. Further, service innovativeness is implied to affect service adoption. But, little research has examined the influence of innovativeness of IT-enabled services on their adoption. By drawing on service dominant logic, this paper examines the effects of service innovativeness and online reviews on IT-enabled services adoption. A preliminary test of the model was performed using initial data of mobile data service applications obtained from a platform. The results reveal that both service innovativeness and the volume of online reviews positively impact IT-enabled service acceptance. However, the valence of online reviews does not impact IT-enabled service adoption. The potential contributions and plans for further testing and enhancing the model are described

Do Constituency Statutes Deter Tax Avoidance?

The constituency statutes, passed mainly in the U.S. in the last century, allow firm directors to consider the interests of stakeholders other than shareholders (i.e., non-financial stakeholders) when making business decisions. One type of critical decisions managers make pertains to corporate tax planning, which creates value for the shareholders at the expense of the public interest or social welfare. In this paper, we investigate whether this law change with a permissive nature affects directors, and hence, managers' attitude towards corporate tax avoidance. Employing a staggered difference-in-difference method, we find that firms incorporated in the states that have adopted constituency statutes exhibit significantly higher ETRs based on current tax expense, but not total tax expense or cash tax paid. This causal relationship suggests that managers, with the permission to consider the social impact of tax avoidance, become less aggressive in tax planning. We further find that the effect of adoption is stronger for financially unconstrained firms and firms in retail businesses, where the demand (cost) for tax avoidance is lower (higher). Finally, we show that our main results are driven by firms located in states with a high sense of social responsibility and the firms with high levels of tax avoidance prior to the adoption. Overall, the findings in this paper suggest a positive social impact brought by the passage of constituency legislations

Value Cocreation for Service Innovation: Examining the Relationships between Service Innovativeness, Customer Participation, and Mobile App Performance

Service innovation is critical to firms’ competitive advantage and, thus, firms desire to make their services increasingly innovative. However, the relationship between the innovativeness and performance of a new service is unclear. Conflicting findings and the related literature suggest that service innovativeness is multidimensional and its impact on performance could be nonlinear. However, limited research has studied these aspects, both theoretically and empirically. Furthermore, prior research has mainly considered customers as inputs to value creation, which may not capture their precise role. Drawing on service-dominant logic, we propose two dimensions of service innovativeness, namely novelty and intensity, which differentially influence the performance of a new service. We further posit that customers are part of the value cocreation process, thereby directly and indirectly affecting new service performance. The model was tested using a panel dataset of 234 mobile apps over 14 months. Results indicate important asymmetries in the impacts of novelty and intensity on mobile app performance: novelty shows a curvilinear relationship with mobile app performance whereas intensity shows a positive linear relationship. Furthermore, customer participation positively impacts mobile app performance and positively moderates the effects of intensity and novelty on mobile app performance

Commercialized Content on Social Media Platforms: Exploring the Drivers of the Viewership of Paid Q&A

Paying to view others’ answers is an emerging business model happening on Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter. Yet, little is known about what drives people to pay to view others’ answers. Based on signaling theory and related literature, we develop a model to predict the viewership of paid-for answers. Using unique panel data of 417 question-to-answers, we find that answer providers’ Weibo level, the number of comments that the paid-for answer receives, as well as the question price positively affect the viewership of the paid-for answer. Our findings contribute to the literature and enlighten content providers and platform organization on how to facilitate individual users to commercialize content for profits

Multi-layered analysis of laughter

International audienceThis paper presents a multi-layered classification of laughter in French and Chinese dialogues (from the DUEL corpus). Analysis related to the form, the semantic meaning and the function of laughter and its context provides a detailed study of the range of uses of laughter and their distributions. A similar distribution was observed in most of the data collected for French and Chi-nese. We ground our classification in a formal semantic and pragmatic analysis. We propose that most functions of laughter can be analyzed by positing a unified meaning with two dimensions, which when aligned with rich contextual reasoning , yields a wide range of functions. However, we also argue that a proper treatment of laughter involves a significant conceptual modification of information state account of dialogue to incorporate emotive aspects of interaction

When do we laugh?

International audienceStudies on laughter in dialogue have proposed resolving what laughter is about by looking at what laughter follows or is adjacent to, even though this assumption has not been tested. Our paper investigates the sequential relation between the laughter and the laughable. We propose a semantic/pragmatic account in which laughter is treated as a gestural event anaphor referring to a laughable. The laughable is a described , metalinguistic or exophoric event which, upon appraisal, triggers a positive psychological shift in the laugher. We analysed a natural dialogue corpus of French and Chinese, and found that the time alignment between laughter and laughable is rather free. Only 30% of laugh-ters immediately follow the laughable. Laughter can occur (long) before, during, or (long) after the laughable; laughter overlapping with speech may not be about the co-occurring speech. Our results falsifies the assumption that what laughter follows is what it is about, and thus questions claims which rely on this assumption

Modelling the effect of gap junctions on tissue-level cardiac electrophysiology

When modelling tissue-level cardiac electrophysiology, continuum approximations to the discrete cell-level equations are used to maintain computational tractability. One of the most commonly used models is represented by the bidomain equations, the derivation of which relies on a homogenisation technique to construct a suitable approximation to the discrete model. This derivation does not explicitly account for the presence of gap junctions connecting one cell to another. It has been seen experimentally [Rohr, Cardiovasc. Res. 2004] that these gap junctions have a marked effect on the propagation of the action potential, specifically as the upstroke of the wave passes through the gap junction. In this paper we explicitly include gap junctions in a both a 2D discrete model of cardiac electrophysiology, and the corresponding continuum model, on a simplified cell geometry. Using these models we compare the results of simulations using both continuum and discrete systems. We see that the form of the action potential as it passes through gap junctions cannot be replicated using a continuum model, and that the underlying propagation speed of the action potential ceases to match up between models when gap junctions are introduced. In addition, the results of the discrete simulations match the characteristics of those shown in Rohr 2004. From this, we suggest that a hybrid model -- a discrete system following the upstroke of the action potential, and a continuum system elsewhere -- may give a more accurate description of cardiac electrophysiology.Comment: In Proceedings HSB 2012, arXiv:1208.315

Understanding Different Cognitive Levels of Social Engagement: Evidence from Paid Q&A

Despite the widespread conversion of free content to paid content, empirical research investigating social engagement in the paid context still lags. Moreover, prior research used like and comment to measure social engagement without considering their differences. In this study, we conceptualize like and comment on two distinct behavioral manifestations differing cognitive processes involved: low- and high-cognitive social engagement. Specifically, setting in a paid Q&A site, we identify the answer provider characteristic (i.e., the number of followers and posts) and answer characteristic (i.e., viewership revenue) as salient factors influencing social engagement. We compare their direct and interaction effects on the two types of social engagement. Results show that identified factors have a greater direct effect and smaller interaction effect on low-cognitive social engagement than on highcognitive social engagement. Our work advances knowledge of social engagement and has practical implications for platform practitioners to achieve social engagement

How Does Social Media Improve Work Efficiency? Insights from the Theory of Communication Visibility

Social media tools have been increasingly used by employees for internal communication, knowledge sharing, and problem-solving. Despite many studies on knowledge sharing in online settings, little has examined what affects employees’ use of social media for work-related knowledge sharing and work efficiency. Drawing on theories of communication visibility and work motivation, this study examines the direct and indirect influence of message transparency and network translucence together with work motivations (i.e., reputation and social networking) on employees’ knowledge sharing. We further hypothesize the impacts of message transparency and network translucence on work efficiency. Based on a survey of 259 employees, we find that message transparency positively influences knowledge sharing and work efficiency. Notably, message transparency weakens the impact of reputation on knowledge sharing while network translucence strengthens the effect of social networking on knowledge sharing. The practical and theoretical implications of our findings are discussed