Strategy, Information, Technology, Economics, and Society (SITES) Minitrack

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10125/42596

This minitrack addresses the interactions between technology and changes in consumer behavior, between consumer behavior and changes in corporate strategy, and between corporate strategy and regulatory policy. The intent is to understand how technology affects strategy, how strategy affects regulation and the law, and how regulation and the law can best serve the interests of society.

In addition to Economics and IS, we seek to engage a broader range of Social Sciences, including Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Public Policy and, of course, the Law. The minitrack will continue to explore topics in Information Economics and Strategy, including but not limited to:

Case studies of the application of strategic IS and their impacts on firms, markets and economies
Economic analysis of investments in information systems in a wide range of competitive and commercial application areas, and the relationships between systems use and market share, profitability, business value or other measures of competitive advantage and firm performance
Strategic analysis of IT and cloud computing services, sourcing, and contracts
Business strategy on the Internet, electronic markets and digital convergence
Property rights, incomplete contracts, transaction costs and other theories to understand inter-organizational IS
Channel development, transformation and conflict in the presence of emerging technologies
Product design with IT, and the bundling and pricing of physical and digital goods and services

The minitrack will also include a wide range of topics that may not be explicitly grounded in Economics. They include:

Privacy and privacy policies, including studies of consumer preferences and attitudes, and regulatory policies designed to balance the needs of the State for stability and self-preservation and the desires of citizens for anonymity and privacy.
Social networks and the changing nature of real world relationships, including but not limited to changes in dating, changes in relationships between employees and their organizations, and the changing relationship between employees at competing organizations based on prior social connections.
Changes in competition law, antitrust law, and regulation, based on new online business models
Social networks and social change, ranging from increased social cohesion to violent regime change

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Eric Clemons (Primary Contact)
University of Pennsylvania
Email: clemons@wharton.upenn.edu

Rajiv Dewan
University of Rochester
Email: rajiv.dewan@rochester.edu

Robert Kauffman
Singapore Management University
Email: rkauffman@smu.edu.sg

Thomas Weber
Ecole Polytechnic Federale de Lausanne
Email: thomas.weber@epfl.ch

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 11

Product Introduction Strategies in the Age of Social Media
(2017-01-04) Mukherjee, Rajiv
When an incumbent faces a new entrant with superior capabilities, it may preemptively announce (preannounce) its future product to avoid forfeiting users. The traditional focus of preannouncement literature has been on truth-telling and vaporware. In the age of social media, the proliferation of online discussion forums and social network usage leads to the formation of public opinions (signals) that may not be in sync with firm’s private information regarding its forthcoming innovation. Further, vigilance by consumers and media outlets induce high ex-post cost on vaporware making it infeasible in such settings. Then, when should firm announce or remain silent in modern settings? Under what conditions should the firm pursue innovation in presence of uncertainties in public signals in addition to its own private information? How does presence of network effects influence the preannouncement strategy of the firm? We find that the incumbent follows a preannouncement strategy (truth-telling or silence) if the public signal associated with it is moderate. Further, network effects has a negative impact on prices and incumbent may innovate only if the entrant’s relative ability to leverage network effects is low.
Patient Choice in Acute Care
(2017-01-04) Cakici, Ozden Engin; Dewan, Rajiv; Freimer, Marshall
Consumer healthcare information plays a critical \ role in informing patients who participate in or make healthcare \ decisions for themselves without direct supervision of a healthcare \ professional. One such example is the choice of facility for \ acute care, prototypically between a fully equipped emergency \ care department (ED) at a hospital and a more convenient \ but less capable urgent care (UC) or retail clinic. We model \ a strategic patient making this decision taking into account the \ limited medical information and convenience factors that affect \ the patient’s decision. This model is then used to inform the \ pricing decision made by the manager of the UC. We show that \ a separating equilibrium, in which all patients self-triaged as noncritical \ choose to go to the UC first, dominates pooling equilibria \ for moderate error rates in self-triage. We analyze the separating \ equilibrium to examine the effect of consumer health information \ (CHI) systems, and show that as the quality of the CHI decreases \ and the error rates go up, the co-pay for an UC decreases, the \ facility is smaller, and makes less profit.
Online Hacker Forum Censorship: Would Banning the Bad Guys Attract Good Guys?
(2017-01-04) Wang, Qiu-Hong; Zhang, Le-Ting; Qiao, Meng-Ke
To tackle the ubiquitous cybersecurity threats, a few countries have enacted legislation to criminalize the production, distribution and possession of computer misuse tools. Consequently, online hacker forums, which enable the provision and dissemination of malicious cyber-attack techniques among potential hackers or technology-savvy users, are subject to censorship. This project examines the mixed impacts of online hacker forum censorship on users’ contribution to protection discussion through a natural experiment with large-scale content analysis. We find that while the enforcement indeed reduced the discussion on malicious cyber-attacks, the discussion on cybersecurity protection could increase or decrease in different scenarios. The rationale is that while the online hacker forum censorship imposes risk to the discussion of malicious attacks, it also reduces the potential benefit from discussing protection issues. Policy implications are discussed.
Link Formation on Twitter: The Role of Achieved Status and Value Homophily
(2017-01-04) Sun, Shujing; Rui, Huaxia
Homophily has been a widely recognized dominant factor in offline social network connection, which refers to one’s propensity to seek interactions with others of similar status or values. Existing studies regarding homophily factors have been limited mostly to offline sociodemographic characteristics, such as race, gender, religion, education and occupation, which may not necessarily manifest homophily in online social network. Some researchers dabble in online social network, but they extract homophily characteristics from static user profile or link data, which has not incorporated the dynamic process of social network. To better understand the key factors in the establishment of online relationship, we explore a large data set on Twitter, which contains all initiated links by 1453 organizational Twitter users over three months. An initiated link refers to organization following a user who is currently not a follower of the organization. We crawl data on a daily basis and monitor whether the initiated one-way link ends up with a two-way relationship. Based on the established homophily theory, we define two online homophily factors: achieved status homophily (estimated by the gap of the followers count), value homophily (measured by the overlap ratio of common followee, Pearson correlation, and Cosine similarity between two users’ tweets, respectively). We find that both homophily factors play a key role in the formation of online reciprocal relationship, and the effect of status homophily is larger for superior followee (one who has more followers than the corresponding organization) than for inferior followee (one who has less followers than the corresponding organization). Our finding not only extends the offline “individual- individual” homophily theory to the new online “organization- individual” relationship, but also provides Twitter users insight into extending their social network by strategically targeting followee.
Incentive Provision and Pro-Social Behaviors
(2017-01-04) Qiao, Dandan; Lee, Shun-Yang; Whinston, Andrew; Wei, Qiang
Individuals’ pro-social behaviors are driven by altruistic and selfish motivations. In this paper we explore how the introduction of external incentives would influence one’s pro-social behavior both in the short term and in the long run. Using a large data set on Amazon product reviews, we design a quasi-experimental approach where we combine a propensity score matching (PSM) and a difference-in-differences (DiD) method to empirically study the effect of incentive provision on reviewer’s behavior. We apply techniques from linguistics, language processing, and machine learning to propose several novel measures to capture reviews’ writing style and quality. We find evidences consistent with crowding-out and overjustification effects. Our study contributes to the understanding of pro-social behavior and sheds light on how incentives would shift individual behavior.
Effects of Donor- and Supporter-Based Campaign Networks on Crowdfunding Campaign Success
(2017-01-04) Wang, Bin; Osatuyi, Babajide; Hou, Wanrong
Driven by the increasing popularity of crowdfunding, academic researchers have examined the impacts of internal social capital accumulated on crowdfunding platforms and external social capital formed through online and offline friend networks on campaign success. However, no research has examined the impacts of social networks from a structural perspective. In the current research, we investigate the extent to which donor- and supporter-based campaign network centralities affect the amount of capital a fundraising campaign is able to generate. Using a panel data set collected from a donation-based crowdfunding platform, Fundly, we reveal that campaign network centralities based on strong ties (shared donors) and weak ties (shared supporters) are more important predictors of fundraising success than the number of donors a campaign has.
Decomposing the Impact of Credit Card Promotions on Consumer Behavior and Merchant Performance
(2017-01-04) Geng, Dan; Kauffman, Robert
Card-based partnerships between banks and retailers have created new opportunities for profit enhancement. We use public data, together with proprietary data from a financial institution to examine the impact of card-based promotions on consumer behavior and merchant performance. The results show that card promotions are associated with increasing customer traffic and transactions from the bank for its merchant partners. We also found significant variation among offer sizes, types, as well as merchant and consumer segments. Our research creates valuable insights and paves the way forward for decision support. \
Controlling and Pricing Shareability
(2017-01-04) Weber, Thomas
In the presence of a peer-to-peer economy, the option of sharing an item is valuable for consumers. By retaining control over the shareability of its products a monopolist can set a sharing tariff in conjunction with the purchase price of the product, in order to extract state-contingent surplus from consumers: the shareability rent. Using an overlapping-generations model with heterogeneous consumers, we determine the jointly optimal retail price and sharing tariff for durable products, and quantify the value for the control of shareability, thus defining the firm's financial boundary conditions for an investment in sharing-control technologies.
Borrower’s Self-Disclosure of Social Media Information in P2P Lending
(2017-01-04) Ge, Ruyi; Gu, Bin; Feng, Juan
In peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, soft information, such as borrowers’ facial features, textual descriptions of loan applications and so on, are regarded as potential signals to screen borrowers. In this study, we examine the signaling effect of a new category of soft information- social media information. Leveraging a unique dataset that combines loan data from a large P2P lending company with social media presence data from a popular social media site, and two natural experiments, we find two forms of social media information that act as signals of borrowers’ creditworthiness. First, borrowers’ choice to self-disclose their social media account is a predictor of their default probability. Second, borrowers’ social media presence, such as their social network and social media engagement, are also predictors of default probability. This study proffers new insights for the screening process in P2P lending and novel usage of social media information.
A Preliminary Test of the Resonance Marketing Hypothesis: Guidance for Future Research Assessing Multi-Attribute Preferences in Horizontal Competition
(2017-01-04) Clemons, Eric; Wilson, Josh
The Resonance Marketing hypothesis suggests that in an era of nearly perfect online information consumers will be able to know everything about products that interest them, including their exact descriptions, the best available sellers, and prices throughout the market. Consumers will then purchase those products that offer the greatest consumer surplus, which may not be the products with lowest prices in areas where individual consumers have the strongest preferences. We divide the Resonance Marketing hypothesis into three testable subordinate hypotheses. We test one of the three, Verifiability: Consumers will not be deceived by false or manipulated content, and will be able to assess products and their reviews and be able to make rational purchase decisions. Preliminary data suggest that testing Verifiability will be difficult and will require complex experimental design. The paper ends with insights into how one would more completely test the Verifiability Hypothesis and suggestions for future research.

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