The Role of Information and Exploitation YouTube Videos on Cross-platform Co-creation and Co-destruction of Value for Mobile Apps
(with Moonwon Chung, Sanghoon Cho, and Manoj Malhotra)
Under review at Production and Operations Management
In this paper, we study the interactions between two digital platforms, namely mobile apps and YouTube, to show how the content published on YouTube influences users’ mobile app engagement and, subsequently, the app’s revenue generation capabilities. Specifically, we identify two types of videos, those that provide useful information and those that provide inappropriate content and information on how to exploit programming bugs to hack and cheat in the game.
Granularity Matters: The Operational Implications of Displayed Rating Scale in Online Marketplaces
(with Nan Zhang and Heng Xu)
Revision in progress
In this paper, I study an online marketplace's strategy to design a display scale for aggregated review ratings addressing its two important purposes in a digital marketplace. One is quality signaling to buyers and the other is establishing an incentive structure that influences sellers’ quality decisions. This paper. Through analyzing a stylized model, we find that the scale should take the form to incentivize quality enhancement for low quality sellers and to avoid creating a moral hazard setting that incentivizes quality degradation for high quality sellers. Through an empirical study of review ratings from Amazon, we illustrate the practical pertinence of our findings by demonstrating the substantial increase in platform revenue, ranging from 7.8% to 50.8%, compared to the equi-width display scale.
Optimism by Design: How Platforms Trade Quality for Availability
(with Nitin Joglekar and Mashall Van Alstyne)
Revision in progress
In this paper, we examine the trade-off in the presence of network externalities. As behavioral operations literature has suggested, our preliminary controlled experiment reveals that the exclusion may result in a buyer’s anchoring heuristics in assessing the average seller quality. By analyzing a game-theoretic model, we find that allowing a high threshold can still induce positive network externalities due to the anchoring effects. The findings also reveal that, in the presence of anchoring effects, platforms can achieve higher revenue by excluding low quality sellers than by allowing all sellers with discriminated prices.
Adventuring to Peak Price or Avoiding the Chase? Relocation Bias and System Performance in a Ridesharing Platform Ecosystem
(with Nitin Joglekar and Marcus Bellamy)
Revision in progress
In this paper, we focus on the ongoing debate in the literature on whether a service provider’s willingness to relocate across demand zones to chase surging prices is rewarded. Specifically, I emphasize a platform’s data-analytic capability to build a better incentive system that is responsive to the evolving dynamics of service providers' relocation behavior. I deploy multiple machine-learning algorithms to identify the relocation bias representing the condition under which the platform’s interest is not aligned with the service provider’s payoff structure.
Governance of Distributed Platforms - Evidence from Multi-Modal Logistics Systems
(with Nitin Joglekar, Naoum Tsolakis, and Geoff Parker)
Work in progress
Price Discrimination and Targeted Advertisement in Two-Sided Markets
(with Nan Zhang and Heng Xu)
Work in progress