Pub Date : 2023-08-23DOI: 10.1080/07421222.2023.2229121
Robert J. Kauffman, Atanu Lahiri
Published in Journal of Management Information Systems (Vol. 40, No. 3, 2023)
发表于《管理信息系统学报》(Vol. 40, No. 3, 2023)
{"title":"Special Section: Digital Strategies for Business Readiness","authors":"Robert J. Kauffman, Atanu Lahiri","doi":"10.1080/07421222.2023.2229121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2023.2229121","url":null,"abstract":"Published in Journal of Management Information Systems (Vol. 40, No. 3, 2023)","PeriodicalId":50154,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Management Information Systems","volume":"40 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49695924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-23DOI: 10.1080/07421222.2023.2229116
Vladimir Zwass
Published in Journal of Management Information Systems (Vol. 40, No. 3, 2023)
发表于《管理信息系统学报》(Vol. 40, No. 3, 2023)
{"title":"Editorial Introduction","authors":"Vladimir Zwass","doi":"10.1080/07421222.2023.2229116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2023.2229116","url":null,"abstract":"Published in Journal of Management Information Systems (Vol. 40, No. 3, 2023)","PeriodicalId":50154,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Management Information Systems","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49695923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07421222.2023.2229124
F. Delkhosh, R. Gopal, Raymond A. Patterson, Niam Yaraghi
ABSTRACT Incentivized blockchain-based online social media (BOSM), where creators and curators of popular content are paid in cryptocurrency, have recently emerged. Traditional social media ecosystems have experienced significant bot involvement in their platforms, which has often had a negative impact on both users and platforms. BOSM can provide additional direct financial incentives as motivation for both bots’ and human users’ engagement. Using the panel vector autoregression and regression discontinuity in time framework, we analyze two distinct data sets from Steemit, the largest and most popular BOSM, to study the impact of bot engagement on human users and the impact of changes in financial reward on user engagement. Interestingly, our findings demonstrate that while increased engagement by bots is positively associated with engagement by human users, the association between bot engagement and human user engagement decreases as the number of votes for a post increases. We also find that shifts in economic incentives significantly influence the behavior of both human users and bots. This research provides significant insights on how social media platforms can leverage economic incentives to influence user behavior and, more importantly, leverage bots’ activity to increase the engagement of their human users.
{"title":"Impact of Bot Involvement in an Incentivized Blockchain-Based Online Social Media Platform","authors":"F. Delkhosh, R. Gopal, Raymond A. Patterson, Niam Yaraghi","doi":"10.1080/07421222.2023.2229124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2023.2229124","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Incentivized blockchain-based online social media (BOSM), where creators and curators of popular content are paid in cryptocurrency, have recently emerged. Traditional social media ecosystems have experienced significant bot involvement in their platforms, which has often had a negative impact on both users and platforms. BOSM can provide additional direct financial incentives as motivation for both bots’ and human users’ engagement. Using the panel vector autoregression and regression discontinuity in time framework, we analyze two distinct data sets from Steemit, the largest and most popular BOSM, to study the impact of bot engagement on human users and the impact of changes in financial reward on user engagement. Interestingly, our findings demonstrate that while increased engagement by bots is positively associated with engagement by human users, the association between bot engagement and human user engagement decreases as the number of votes for a post increases. We also find that shifts in economic incentives significantly influence the behavior of both human users and bots. This research provides significant insights on how social media platforms can leverage economic incentives to influence user behavior and, more importantly, leverage bots’ activity to increase the engagement of their human users.","PeriodicalId":50154,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Management Information Systems","volume":"40 1","pages":"778 - 806"},"PeriodicalIF":7.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43387819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07421222.2023.2229126
O. Nwafor, Xiaowei Ma, N. Johnson, Rahul Singh, R. Aron
ABSTRACT We examine how hospital cost efficiency can improve because of knowledge spillover effects, arising from the experiences of members of a healthcare system. We identify two types of functional technology networks—that we term repository-type and workflow-type networks—which are defined by the adoption patterns of different types of electronic health record (EHR) systems application functions by hospitals in a health system. Additionally, we examine how structural features of these two network types—namely, network centrality and interconnectedness—impact such knowledge spillover effects. By analyzing seven years of panel data for 1,420 U.S. hospitals across 216 health systems, and data obtained from surveys of healthcare experts, we found that greater centrality of nodes in repository-type networks enhances the influence of partners’ experiences on cost efficiency but has the opposite effect in workflow-type networks, while greater interconnectedness of workflow-type networks enhances the influence of partners’ experiences on cost efficiency. Interestingly, we found the opposite effect in repository-type networks, where greater interconnectedness diminishes the influence of partners’ experiences on cost efficiency. We discuss reasons for this surprising and counterintuitive finding. Overall, our results demonstrate that at least in healthcare settings where information technologies enable knowledge-sharing networks to be formed, benefits can accrue through knowledge spillover effects; moreover, variations across functional categories of technologies adopted in a network context can result in different technology-network structures with differential impacts on hospital cost efficiency because of their influence on knowledge spillover at both the hospital and system levels. Not only can these results explain mixed findings in the literature that has been dominated by a focus on cost efficiency outcomes dependent solely on the EHR adoption choices of individual hospitals, but they also provide the basis for guidelines for a network-based perspective of technology adoption. We discuss other possible settings to which our empirical findings can be reasonably generalized, including supply chain technologies and the Internet of Things.
{"title":"Differential Impacts of Technology-Network Structures on Cost Efficiency: Knowledge Spillovers in Healthcare","authors":"O. Nwafor, Xiaowei Ma, N. Johnson, Rahul Singh, R. Aron","doi":"10.1080/07421222.2023.2229126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2023.2229126","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT We examine how hospital cost efficiency can improve because of knowledge spillover effects, arising from the experiences of members of a healthcare system. We identify two types of functional technology networks—that we term repository-type and workflow-type networks—which are defined by the adoption patterns of different types of electronic health record (EHR) systems application functions by hospitals in a health system. Additionally, we examine how structural features of these two network types—namely, network centrality and interconnectedness—impact such knowledge spillover effects. By analyzing seven years of panel data for 1,420 U.S. hospitals across 216 health systems, and data obtained from surveys of healthcare experts, we found that greater centrality of nodes in repository-type networks enhances the influence of partners’ experiences on cost efficiency but has the opposite effect in workflow-type networks, while greater interconnectedness of workflow-type networks enhances the influence of partners’ experiences on cost efficiency. Interestingly, we found the opposite effect in repository-type networks, where greater interconnectedness diminishes the influence of partners’ experiences on cost efficiency. We discuss reasons for this surprising and counterintuitive finding. Overall, our results demonstrate that at least in healthcare settings where information technologies enable knowledge-sharing networks to be formed, benefits can accrue through knowledge spillover effects; moreover, variations across functional categories of technologies adopted in a network context can result in different technology-network structures with differential impacts on hospital cost efficiency because of their influence on knowledge spillover at both the hospital and system levels. Not only can these results explain mixed findings in the literature that has been dominated by a focus on cost efficiency outcomes dependent solely on the EHR adoption choices of individual hospitals, but they also provide the basis for guidelines for a network-based perspective of technology adoption. We discuss other possible settings to which our empirical findings can be reasonably generalized, including supply chain technologies and the Internet of Things.","PeriodicalId":50154,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Management Information Systems","volume":"40 1","pages":"840 - 882"},"PeriodicalIF":7.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45325994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07421222.2023.2229118
Andrew J. Harrison, A. Mirsadikov, Truong (Jack) Luu
ABSTRACT Media capabilities influence consumers’ trust in online exchanges. However, in the sharing economy, where consumers interact with service providers through a platform, conventional models of trust must be revisited. Our research identifies how media synchronicity and anonymity influence the relative importance of institution-based trust in sharing economy exchanges. We collected data from 248 ride-hailing customers and 288 cryptocurrency users to test a moderated mediation model of trust. We find that in the sharing economy media synchronicity and anonymity lead customers to develop trust toward service providers directly and undermine the impact of institutional trust mechanisms. This indicates that in sharing economy exchanges, trust can be built directly with the service provider, or alternatively, indirectly through the platform. Consequently, organizations in the sharing economy can strategically design their systems to engender trust by choosing between (1) emphasizing the platform’s reputation or (2) encouraging direct communication between the consumer and service providers.
{"title":"Influence of Media Capabilities on Trust in the Sharing Economy","authors":"Andrew J. Harrison, A. Mirsadikov, Truong (Jack) Luu","doi":"10.1080/07421222.2023.2229118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2023.2229118","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Media capabilities influence consumers’ trust in online exchanges. However, in the sharing economy, where consumers interact with service providers through a platform, conventional models of trust must be revisited. Our research identifies how media synchronicity and anonymity influence the relative importance of institution-based trust in sharing economy exchanges. We collected data from 248 ride-hailing customers and 288 cryptocurrency users to test a moderated mediation model of trust. We find that in the sharing economy media synchronicity and anonymity lead customers to develop trust toward service providers directly and undermine the impact of institutional trust mechanisms. This indicates that in sharing economy exchanges, trust can be built directly with the service provider, or alternatively, indirectly through the platform. Consequently, organizations in the sharing economy can strategically design their systems to engender trust by choosing between (1) emphasizing the platform’s reputation or (2) encouraging direct communication between the consumer and service providers.","PeriodicalId":50154,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Management Information Systems","volume":"40 1","pages":"953 - 982"},"PeriodicalIF":7.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49004725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07421222.2023.2229119
Lei (Nico) Zheng, Feng Mai, Bei Yan, J. Nickerson
ABSTRACT Participants in open collaboration communities coproduce knowledge despite minimal explicit communication to coordinate the efforts. Studying how participants coordinate around the knowledge artifact and its impacts are critical for understanding the open knowledge production model. This study builds on the theory of stigmergy, wherein actions performed by a participant leave traces on a knowledge artifact and stimulate succeeding actions. We find that stigmergy involves two intertwined processes: collective modification and collective excitation. We propose a new measure of stigmergy based on the spatial and temporal clustering of contributions. By analyzing thousands of Wikipedia articles, we find that the degree of stigmergy is positively associated with community members’ participation and the quality of the knowledge produced. This study contributes to the understanding of open collaboration by characterizing the spatial-temporal clustering of contributions and providing new insights into the relationship between stigmergy and knowledge production outcomes. These findings can help practitioners increase user engagement in knowledge production processes in order to create more sustainable open collaboration communities.
{"title":"Stigmergy in Open Collaboration: An Empirical Investigation Based on Wikipedia","authors":"Lei (Nico) Zheng, Feng Mai, Bei Yan, J. Nickerson","doi":"10.1080/07421222.2023.2229119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2023.2229119","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Participants in open collaboration communities coproduce knowledge despite minimal explicit communication to coordinate the efforts. Studying how participants coordinate around the knowledge artifact and its impacts are critical for understanding the open knowledge production model. This study builds on the theory of stigmergy, wherein actions performed by a participant leave traces on a knowledge artifact and stimulate succeeding actions. We find that stigmergy involves two intertwined processes: collective modification and collective excitation. We propose a new measure of stigmergy based on the spatial and temporal clustering of contributions. By analyzing thousands of Wikipedia articles, we find that the degree of stigmergy is positively associated with community members’ participation and the quality of the knowledge produced. This study contributes to the understanding of open collaboration by characterizing the spatial-temporal clustering of contributions and providing new insights into the relationship between stigmergy and knowledge production outcomes. These findings can help practitioners increase user engagement in knowledge production processes in order to create more sustainable open collaboration communities.","PeriodicalId":50154,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Management Information Systems","volume":"40 1","pages":"983 - 1008"},"PeriodicalIF":7.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44633729","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07421222.2023.2229127
A. Brendel, Fabian Hildebrandt, Alan Dennis, Johannes Riquel
ABSTRACT Conversational Agents (CAs) are becoming part of our everyday lives. About 10 percent of users display aggressive behavior toward CAs, such as swearing at them when they produce errors. We conducted two online experiments to understand user aggression toward CAs better. In the first experiment, 175 participants used either a humanlike CA or a non-humanlike CA. Both CAs worked without errors, and we observed no increased frustration or user aggression. The second experiment (with 201 participants) was the focus of this study; in it, both CAs produce a series of errors. The results show that frustration with errors drives aggression, and users with higher impulsivity are more likely to become aggressive when frustrated. The results also suggest that there are three pathways by which perceived humanness influences users’ aggression to CAs. First, perceived humanness directly increases the frustration with the CA when it produces errors. Second, perceived humanness increases service satisfaction which in turn reduces frustration. Third, perceived humanness influences the nature of aggression when users become frustrated (i.e., users are less likely to use highly offensive words with a more humanlike CA). Our research contributes to our theoretical understanding of the role of anthropomorphism in the interaction with machines, showing that designing a CA to be more humanlike is a double-edged sword—both increasing and decreasing the frustration that leads to aggression—and also a means to reduce the most severe aggression.
{"title":"The Paradoxical Role of Humanness in Aggression Toward Conversational Agents","authors":"A. Brendel, Fabian Hildebrandt, Alan Dennis, Johannes Riquel","doi":"10.1080/07421222.2023.2229127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2023.2229127","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Conversational Agents (CAs) are becoming part of our everyday lives. About 10 percent of users display aggressive behavior toward CAs, such as swearing at them when they produce errors. We conducted two online experiments to understand user aggression toward CAs better. In the first experiment, 175 participants used either a humanlike CA or a non-humanlike CA. Both CAs worked without errors, and we observed no increased frustration or user aggression. The second experiment (with 201 participants) was the focus of this study; in it, both CAs produce a series of errors. The results show that frustration with errors drives aggression, and users with higher impulsivity are more likely to become aggressive when frustrated. The results also suggest that there are three pathways by which perceived humanness influences users’ aggression to CAs. First, perceived humanness directly increases the frustration with the CA when it produces errors. Second, perceived humanness increases service satisfaction which in turn reduces frustration. Third, perceived humanness influences the nature of aggression when users become frustrated (i.e., users are less likely to use highly offensive words with a more humanlike CA). Our research contributes to our theoretical understanding of the role of anthropomorphism in the interaction with machines, showing that designing a CA to be more humanlike is a double-edged sword—both increasing and decreasing the frustration that leads to aggression—and also a means to reduce the most severe aggression.","PeriodicalId":50154,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Management Information Systems","volume":"40 1","pages":"883 - 913"},"PeriodicalIF":7.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48252995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07421222.2023.2229125
E. Anderson, Geoffrey G. Parker, B. Tan
ABSTRACT Multi-sided platforms must make decisions on both pricing and engineering investment and must continually adjust them as the platform scales over its lifecycle. Engineering investments can be allocated to features that improve a platform’s standalone value, social features to take advantage of same-side network effects, or integration tools and boundary resources to facilitate third-party content creation. Guidance in the academic or practitioner literature is not granular. Moreover, relevant normative economic models that consider externalities are rarely dynamic. Hence, there is a gap in knowledge about how to best balance tradeoffs between different strategic decisions throughout the entire platform lifecycle. To begin to address this gap, we explore normative strategies for coordinating pricing and engineering investment decisions on a continuous basis under different ecosystem conditions. We build a simulation model informed by economics and marketing theory and perform extensive sensitivity analyses on key parameters in different ecosystem scenarios over a multi-period lifecycle. We find that pricing and investment strategies must continuously change to perform optimally. In particular, strategies that are most effective at launch often differ from those that are most effective during scaling as well as those most effective at maturity. We also find that the optimal strategy depends strongly on the monetization model and market aversion to price changes. Lastly, we specifically examine four different industry segments: mobile platforms, social media, the sharing economy, and business-to-business. The results provide evidence that the trajectory of platform pricing and investment strategies should greatly differ depending on industrial context.
{"title":"Strategic Investments for Platform Launch and Ecosystem Growth: A Dynamic Analysis","authors":"E. Anderson, Geoffrey G. Parker, B. Tan","doi":"10.1080/07421222.2023.2229125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2023.2229125","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Multi-sided platforms must make decisions on both pricing and engineering investment and must continually adjust them as the platform scales over its lifecycle. Engineering investments can be allocated to features that improve a platform’s standalone value, social features to take advantage of same-side network effects, or integration tools and boundary resources to facilitate third-party content creation. Guidance in the academic or practitioner literature is not granular. Moreover, relevant normative economic models that consider externalities are rarely dynamic. Hence, there is a gap in knowledge about how to best balance tradeoffs between different strategic decisions throughout the entire platform lifecycle. To begin to address this gap, we explore normative strategies for coordinating pricing and engineering investment decisions on a continuous basis under different ecosystem conditions. We build a simulation model informed by economics and marketing theory and perform extensive sensitivity analyses on key parameters in different ecosystem scenarios over a multi-period lifecycle. We find that pricing and investment strategies must continuously change to perform optimally. In particular, strategies that are most effective at launch often differ from those that are most effective during scaling as well as those most effective at maturity. We also find that the optimal strategy depends strongly on the monetization model and market aversion to price changes. Lastly, we specifically examine four different industry segments: mobile platforms, social media, the sharing economy, and business-to-business. The results provide evidence that the trajectory of platform pricing and investment strategies should greatly differ depending on industrial context.","PeriodicalId":50154,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Management Information Systems","volume":"40 1","pages":"807 - 839"},"PeriodicalIF":7.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47407420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07421222.2023.2229122
H. Bhargava
ABSTRACT A contemporary business challenge for bundling theory is the distribution of digital content such as media, entertainment, software, and other information goods. Consumers can use a number of devices to interact with software, online services, music, video, news, and other forms of digital content. For instance, Netflix videos and Kindle ebooks, initially accessed only on television sets and computers, respectively, are now also consumed on smartphones and tablets. Print products are now distributed and consumed both in print and digitally. Firms offer product line designs that include prices for single device access as also bundle discounts for multi-device access, so that consumers can choose a device or even multiple devices. This paper provides guidelines regarding such multi-device product line design and pricing. A starting point is to note that there are many ways to practice bundling, from offering prices for single-device consumption as well as a bundle discount (mixed bundling), to forcing multi-device prices (pure bundling), and designs in between (partial bundling). Picking the best design, and associated prices, is a complex problem due to how single-device demand functions relate to multi-device demand. Recognizing that some dual-device purchases can occur even when there is no bundle discount, the paper develops intuition around the net gain or loss incurred from giving a bundle discount to entice single-device access buyers to dual sales. One surprising finding is that inducing dual sales through bundle discounts can be profitable even when intent to consume multiple times is quite weak, because in this case dual sales would not occur organically. Less surprisingly, such inducement is also profitable when multi-consumption intent is strong, and least attractive when the intent is moderate. When one of the devices is an emerging one or has weak own demand in the short term, then it can be useful to offer a partial bundle, tying sales for the stronger device into a bundle comprising access to both devices. When device valuations are such that consumers generally agree on the rank-ordering of the devices (e.g., if a location-based app offers greater value on a smartphone than on a tablet), then it is best to employ some type of bundling, unless the intent for multi-device consumption is proportionally lower among low-value consumers than for high-value consumers.
{"title":"Multi-Device Consumption of Digital Goods: Optimal Product Line Design with Bundling","authors":"H. Bhargava","doi":"10.1080/07421222.2023.2229122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2023.2229122","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT A contemporary business challenge for bundling theory is the distribution of digital content such as media, entertainment, software, and other information goods. Consumers can use a number of devices to interact with software, online services, music, video, news, and other forms of digital content. For instance, Netflix videos and Kindle ebooks, initially accessed only on television sets and computers, respectively, are now also consumed on smartphones and tablets. Print products are now distributed and consumed both in print and digitally. Firms offer product line designs that include prices for single device access as also bundle discounts for multi-device access, so that consumers can choose a device or even multiple devices. This paper provides guidelines regarding such multi-device product line design and pricing. A starting point is to note that there are many ways to practice bundling, from offering prices for single-device consumption as well as a bundle discount (mixed bundling), to forcing multi-device prices (pure bundling), and designs in between (partial bundling). Picking the best design, and associated prices, is a complex problem due to how single-device demand functions relate to multi-device demand. Recognizing that some dual-device purchases can occur even when there is no bundle discount, the paper develops intuition around the net gain or loss incurred from giving a bundle discount to entice single-device access buyers to dual sales. One surprising finding is that inducing dual sales through bundle discounts can be profitable even when intent to consume multiple times is quite weak, because in this case dual sales would not occur organically. Less surprisingly, such inducement is also profitable when multi-consumption intent is strong, and least attractive when the intent is moderate. When one of the devices is an emerging one or has weak own demand in the short term, then it can be useful to offer a partial bundle, tying sales for the stronger device into a bundle comprising access to both devices. When device valuations are such that consumers generally agree on the rank-ordering of the devices (e.g., if a location-based app offers greater value on a smartphone than on a tablet), then it is best to employ some type of bundling, unless the intent for multi-device consumption is proportionally lower among low-value consumers than for high-value consumers.","PeriodicalId":50154,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Management Information Systems","volume":"40 1","pages":"724 - 751"},"PeriodicalIF":7.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46152088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07421222.2023.2229128
P. Lowry, Junji Xiao, Jia Yuan
ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the herding behavior that characterizes lenders’ lending decisions on a microloan platform and explains how rational herding behavior can resolve the information-asymmetry problem, which is a well-known reason for the failure of online microloan platforms. Using a set of panel data on individual lending decisions acquired from Paipaidai.com (PPDai), an online microloan platform, we examine the influence of the lending decisions of prominent, experienced lenders on novice lenders to identify rational herding behavior. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that rational herding behavior can in fact efficiently reduce lender loss from borrower defaults caused by limited information. Although it is typically assumed that herding behavior is irrational, we find that it can be rational in this context and can thus shed light on why PPDai has succeeded while most other microloan platforms have failed. Accordingly, we make three key contributions: 1) we use heterogeneous herding effects to empirically determine whether lenders’ herding behavior on PPDai is rational based on observational learning; 2) we investigate the moderating effect of borrower credit and novice-lender experience on herding, and we leverage this heterogeneity in lender experience to better explain loan results; and 3) because PPDai publicly provides potential lenders with a transparent credit score—in contrast to platforms like Prosper.com, which leverage hidden proprietary credit information from Experian—we further analyze the credit composition of prominent lenders to better understand the crucial determinants of rational herding. In fact, our follow-up survival simulations indicate that without rational herding, the total number of successful PPDai loans would have decreased by around 46 percent during the study period—a finding that further underlines the crucial influence of rational herding and the unique contextual factors of PPDai that have fostered it.
{"title":"How Lending Experience and Borrower Credit Influence Rational Herding Behavior in Peer-to-Peer Microloan Platform Markets","authors":"P. Lowry, Junji Xiao, Jia Yuan","doi":"10.1080/07421222.2023.2229128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2023.2229128","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the herding behavior that characterizes lenders’ lending decisions on a microloan platform and explains how rational herding behavior can resolve the information-asymmetry problem, which is a well-known reason for the failure of online microloan platforms. Using a set of panel data on individual lending decisions acquired from Paipaidai.com (PPDai), an online microloan platform, we examine the influence of the lending decisions of prominent, experienced lenders on novice lenders to identify rational herding behavior. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that rational herding behavior can in fact efficiently reduce lender loss from borrower defaults caused by limited information. Although it is typically assumed that herding behavior is irrational, we find that it can be rational in this context and can thus shed light on why PPDai has succeeded while most other microloan platforms have failed. Accordingly, we make three key contributions: 1) we use heterogeneous herding effects to empirically determine whether lenders’ herding behavior on PPDai is rational based on observational learning; 2) we investigate the moderating effect of borrower credit and novice-lender experience on herding, and we leverage this heterogeneity in lender experience to better explain loan results; and 3) because PPDai publicly provides potential lenders with a transparent credit score—in contrast to platforms like Prosper.com, which leverage hidden proprietary credit information from Experian—we further analyze the credit composition of prominent lenders to better understand the crucial determinants of rational herding. In fact, our follow-up survival simulations indicate that without rational herding, the total number of successful PPDai loans would have decreased by around 46 percent during the study period—a finding that further underlines the crucial influence of rational herding and the unique contextual factors of PPDai that have fostered it.","PeriodicalId":50154,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Management Information Systems","volume":"40 1","pages":"914 - 952"},"PeriodicalIF":7.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47339595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}