Essays on User Behavior in Online Platforms

Essays on User Behavior in Online Platforms PDF Author: Kyung Min Park
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this dissertation, I investigate user behavior in two different domains: online shopping and online learning. The first essay examines the provision of helpful product video reviews. As the provision of online review videos grows and consumers increasingly rely on them for their purchase decisions, understanding factors that contribute to the perceived helpfulness of video reviews becomes critical for video review management. I find that video viewers perceive online product review videos that are more visually stimulating, more positive, and less subjective as more helpful. In addition, review videos are perceived as more helpful when reviewers reveal their faces in their reviews and when reviewers speak with faster speech rates and lower voice pitch. The second essay studies the dynamics of students’ online social engagement in the context of online learning and how the recent COVID-19 pandemic affected it. I propose a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with students’ self-efficacy as hidden states to investigate the dynamics of elementary school students’ online social behavior. The result suggests that the amount of proactive social activities from teachers, peers, and parents have positive effects on students’ social engagement in any given self-efficacy state. The analysis on state transition suggests that the social influences from teachers, parents, and peers on students’ self-efficacy are positive for students with high self-efficacy. When students have lower self-efficacy, the peer influence on their self-efficacy is negative. However, the positive influences from teachers and parents can mitigate such negative peer influences. The results also imply that students’ self-observation of their past behavioral patterns positively affects their self-efficacy. Finally, the results suggest that the relative importance of parental influence and students’ personal influence increased during the pandemic. The reduced face-to-face schooling can explain such change during the pandemic.

Essays on User Behavior in Online Platforms

Essays on User Behavior in Online Platforms PDF Author: Kyung Min Park
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this dissertation, I investigate user behavior in two different domains: online shopping and online learning. The first essay examines the provision of helpful product video reviews. As the provision of online review videos grows and consumers increasingly rely on them for their purchase decisions, understanding factors that contribute to the perceived helpfulness of video reviews becomes critical for video review management. I find that video viewers perceive online product review videos that are more visually stimulating, more positive, and less subjective as more helpful. In addition, review videos are perceived as more helpful when reviewers reveal their faces in their reviews and when reviewers speak with faster speech rates and lower voice pitch. The second essay studies the dynamics of students’ online social engagement in the context of online learning and how the recent COVID-19 pandemic affected it. I propose a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with students’ self-efficacy as hidden states to investigate the dynamics of elementary school students’ online social behavior. The result suggests that the amount of proactive social activities from teachers, peers, and parents have positive effects on students’ social engagement in any given self-efficacy state. The analysis on state transition suggests that the social influences from teachers, parents, and peers on students’ self-efficacy are positive for students with high self-efficacy. When students have lower self-efficacy, the peer influence on their self-efficacy is negative. However, the positive influences from teachers and parents can mitigate such negative peer influences. The results also imply that students’ self-observation of their past behavioral patterns positively affects their self-efficacy. Finally, the results suggest that the relative importance of parental influence and students’ personal influence increased during the pandemic. The reduced face-to-face schooling can explain such change during the pandemic.

Three Essays on Social Media Use and Information Sharing Behavior

Three Essays on Social Media Use and Information Sharing Behavior PDF Author: Sarbottam Bhagat
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Social media platforms create rich social structures, expand users' boundaries of social networks and revolutionize traditional forms of communications, social interactions and social relationships. These platforms not only facilitate the creation and sharing of news and information, but they also drive various kinds of businesses models, processes and operations, knowledge sharing, marketing strategies for brand management and socio-political discourses essential for healthy and democratic functions. As such, social media has greater implications on organizations and society brought about by individuals' social media usage patterns, and therefore, calls for further investigations. The main objective of this dissertation is to explore and offer insights into such social media usage and information sharing behaviors via data driven examination of various theories. This dissertation involves three studies that focus on factors that explain individuals' three different social media usage behaviors. Essay 1 investigates individuals' perceived importance of online affiliation, self-esteem, self-regulation and risk-benefit structure as antecedents of users' geo-tagging behavior on social media. Essay 2 examines the role of online news quality, source credibility, individuals' perception towards online civic engagement, attitude towards news sharing and social influences to understand users' news sharing behavior on social media platforms. Essay 3 seeks to examine the individuals' information verification behavior on social media through the lens of individuals' fake news awareness, perceived cost of information verification, trust in social media and truth-seeking.

Essays on the Empirical Analysis in Seller Behavior in Online Marketplace

Essays on the Empirical Analysis in Seller Behavior in Online Marketplace PDF Author: Haoyan Sun
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Internet marketing
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
In this dissertation, I examine problems that related to the phenomena of online marketplace. I specifically study how different forms of digital communications affect consumers and how online sellers can strategically adopt these tools to connect with them. In this dissertation, I investigate the effectiveness of various digital marketing strategies, such as sponsored search, social media endorsement, live chat, and buyer protection program, and how both the platform and marketplace sellers can leverage those tools to improve their businesses. The findings suggest that platforms should keep providing innovation tools to help online sellers to grows, it will not only be beneficial to the sellers, but also be critical to the growth of online platforms.

THREE ESSAYS ON THE IMPACT OF FIRMS' DIGITAL COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES ON ONLINE CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

THREE ESSAYS ON THE IMPACT OF FIRMS' DIGITAL COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES ON ONLINE CONSUMER BEHAVIOR PDF Author: Siddharth Bhattacharya
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In my dissertation, I study the strategic interplay among firm's online communication, firm's digital strategies and its impact on consumer decision making. I identify important strategies that firms can adopt while targeting consumers on search engine platforms, such as Google and Bing. For technology-firms interested in providing information cues to consumers, online advertising serves as an important tool to nudge consumers decision making. Through the use of diverse methodologies, including empirical, analytical, and behavioral, I attempt to answer important questions in this research space. Moreover, I investigate how firm strategies are affected by factors such as heterogeneity of consumer preferences, product quality, and competition. The research spans across disciplines, and makes contributions to Information Systems, Operations Management and Marketing. In essay 1 I investigate the novel context of "competitive poaching", a phenomenon where firms can generate traffic from search advertising by bidding on competitors' keywords. In this research I examine the factors that influence the effectiveness of competitive poaching, specifically the role of different ad copies and the type of competitor (poached brand) from which a brand is "poaching. "I also examine how the presence of sponsored ads from the poached brand and its physical location affect competitive poaching. In Essay 2, I investigate a similar context but here instead of only competing against each other, firms are simultaneously competing and cooperating with each other while advertising on the search engine. Thus, we have a novel context where a firm and its third-party referral partner (often referred to as "Infomediaries") compete and cooperate while advertising simultaneously on the search engine. In this context, how equilibrium payment and advertising strategies are affected by factors such as traffic quality, advertising effectiveness, leakage, and the nature of contract between the two firms, remains an open question. Using a game-theoretic model, I show that the novel balance between the competitive and the collaborative nature of the interaction, which itself gets affected by the choice of contract and changes in the environmental factors, alters equilibrium strategies commonly expected in existing literature. In my third essay, I study the novel yet increasingly common phenomenon of "multiscreen viewing", a phenomenon where consumers are increasingly using additional devices (like smartphones or tablets) while watching TV. This provides an additional advertising channel for marketers, specifically the second screen. However, this is not without its complexities; as marketers must optimally time advertisements on the second screen conditional on multiple factors including consumers' engagement level on the primary screen, consumers' engagement level on the second screen, and the psychological involvement with the content on the primary screen. Administering multiple behavioral experiments, I investigate how factors such as users' engagement with the primary screen (e.g., TV), users' engagement with a second screen (e.g., Mobile), timing of the advertisement, and message congruence, affect second screen usage and ad recall. Theoretical and managerial contributions of each of these essays are discussed.

The Dynamics of Online User Behavior and IS Policy Implications

The Dynamics of Online User Behavior and IS Policy Implications PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This dissertation, which comprises three independent essays, explores the dynamics of online user behavior and provides IS policy implications across three different applications. The first essay employs an econometric empirical analysis to examine the role of IT interventions on online users' gambling behavior, based on field data collected over 10 years from 3,526 online gamblers. The second essay develops a model of third-party review systems and uses incentive-aligned experimental approach in investigating the role of identity disclosure on the third-party review system's reliability. The third essay incorporates a natural language processing algorithms (i.e., text mining approach) to examine the textual characteristics of online reviews and study when consumers perceive online reviews helpful, based on 19,533 online reviews collected from Yelp. Several policy implications for IT firms and society are proposed based on new discoveries. First, providing simple IT interventions (such as behavior monitoring and partial restrictions) to online gamblers are effective in breaking habitual patterns in the context of online gambling. Second, by disclosing reviewers' identity, the third-party review system loses objectivity because the reviewers become altruistic toward service providers. Findings can be easily extended into designing online review systems. Third, online reviews containing diverse topics and unpleasant emotions with high arousal (e.g., anger, anxiety, and disgust) are perceived more helpful. Online review providers can use these findings in identifying the most helpful reviews at an early stage and motivate consumers to provide more helpful information.

Consumer Decision Sciences in Modern Online Platforms

Consumer Decision Sciences in Modern Online Platforms PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Advancements in computing and information technologies have offered ample opportunities for designing innovative online platforms. This dissertation documents three independent essays to examine several examples of modern online platforms, and more important, to examine consumer behavior and decision-making upon using these platforms. Essay 1 conceptualizes a model for the generation process of online product reviews and validates it using a huge web-crawled dataset collected from an online social medium. Essay 2 builds and empirically tests a model for how consumers use an online gambling service, based on an objective usage database of more than 40,000 Internet gamblers. Essay 3 invents an instantaneous decision model of bidding behavior for users of a new form of popular online auctions, and empirically estimates it using archival data of thousands of such users. Several original discoveries are made. First, the extent that online product reviews influence consumers varies significantly by the characteristics of the consumers and how they process information. Novice consumers, males, those who are geographically constrained or socially isolated, and in those times when they are less actively or less thoughtfully processing information, are more susceptible to the public opinions about a product. Second, online gambling decisions are significantly influenced by cumulative gambling outcomes, recent gambling outcomes, and previous gambling behavior. Third, contrary to another study of online pay-to-bid auction that relied on aggregate data, here I found that the majority of consumers is risk averse, and such risk aversion is even more pronounced following the introduction of new bidding policies. Altogether, these findings provide insights for both academics and practices to better understand consumer behavior and decision-making, and to improve the design of such and similar online platforms. More contextualized theories, methods, contributions, as well as limitations and opportunities for future research, are elaborated in each of the following essays.

Essays on Digital Experience

Essays on Digital Experience PDF Author: Murat Unal
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Ecommerce retailers are increasingly faced with challenges of finding ways to provide a seamless shopping experience to customers. In the first chapter of this dissertation, we focus on the checkout process and study the impact of adopting one-click buying, a feature that reduces the number of steps required to place a purchase order to a single click, on subsequent customer behavior. Using quasi-experimental data over a period of 35 months from an online retailer before and after the launch of one-click buying, we find adopting one-click buying is effective in lifting customer purchases and does so by making treated customers purchase more often as well as more items. The impact of adopting one-click buying on customer purchases post adoption is economically significant, persistent over time, and heterogeneous across customers. Analyzing clickstream data of customer activity online and purchases across product categories, we provide evidence that the increase in purchases is driven by richer engagement through both more visits to the website and more page views upon visit as well as the expansion of purchases across categories. We discuss the implications of our findings for customer experience and targeting. In the second chapter, we study the impact of online product sampling on customer behavior. Online product sampling offers customers the try-before-you-buy experience to overcome the shortcomings of information loss they experience when purchasing physical experience products such as food, beverages, and apparel in ecommerce. Using quasi-experimental data over a period of 13 months from a retailer before and after the launch of online product sampling, we find online product sampling is effective in lifting customer purchases and does so by making treated customers purchase more items per order. We find the impact of online product sampling on purchases post treatment is economically significant, persistent over time, and heterogeneous across customers. Furthermore, we find the impact spills over positively to brand demand and expands to both online and offline channels. We provide evidence that product sampling generates positive affect among treated consumers. In the third chapter, we study the impact of a policy change by Facebook, a major social media platform, on user behavior. Platform algorithms play an important role in the digital economy. They serve as gatekeepers in social media platforms because they determine visibility, sharing and flow of information. They also affect both intermediaries who publish content to generate traffics to their websites and users who engage to consume and share content on the platforms. Using data from a series of experiments conducted at a publisher's website over a period of 121 weeks before and after the policy change by Facebook on its algorithm, which aimed to improve user engagement, we find the policy change significantly affected user behavior. In particular, after the change went into effect, user engagement decreased significantly insofar as users made significantly fewer clicks on the publisher's website. Using Google search volume data, we provide evidence on the selection mechanism on users through which the policy change by Facebook affected users. We discuss the implications of our findings for platforms, intermediaries and users.

Essays on Behaviors of Online Crowds

Essays on Behaviors of Online Crowds PDF Author: Ho Cheung Brian Lee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This dissertation consists of three essays studying three different kinds of online communities – namely online crowds – that help firms to solve business problems. The first essay investigates prediction markets, online market exchanges for predicting events such as election results and new product sales. We ask whether prediction markets provide consistent and fallacy-free forecasts. We find that prices in the Presidential Election markets are occasionally prone to fallacies, and the prices from these markets cannot always be interpreted as accurate and noiseless representations of probabilities for predicted events. Our results suggest that the information gathered from prediction markets must be interpreted with caution. The second essay examines the contributing behavior of online backers on reward-based crowdfunding (RBC) platforms. RBC platforms allow the public to pledge money to a project and receive a reward. This paper focuses on backers who pledge more money than is required to claim a reward. We find that backers tend to contribute less when the project has already received a high amount of funding. However, backers tend to contribute more when the project is supported by a high number of backers. In addition, we show that herding may occur among the backers who only pledge money without claiming any rewards. These results help us understand more about contributing behaviors among online backers on RBC platforms. Crowdsourcing is a way to outsource a business task to an online community. The third essay investigates how the feedback information on a crowdsourcing platform and the systematic bias of crowdsourcing workers can affect outcomes. Specifically, we examine the role of a systematic bias – namely the salience bias – in influencing crowdsourcing platform performance. Our results suggest that the salience bias influences the performance of contestants, including the winners of the contests. Furthermore, we show that the number of crowdsourcing contestants moderates the impact of the salience bias due to the parallel path effect and competition effect. These results provide important implications for crowdsourcing firms and platform designers.

User Behavior in Ubiquitous Online Environments

User Behavior in Ubiquitous Online Environments PDF Author: Pelet, Jean-Eric
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1466645679
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
As mobile technologies grow in popularity and widespread use, more and more applications—from banking software to online education—make their way to smartphones, tablets, and other such mobile devices. To be truly effective, organizations must adapt to this changing online landscape and the paradigm of anytime, anywhere access. User Behavior in Ubiquitous Online Environments explores how users interact with mobile devices and applications in an array of contexts, providing relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research on ubiquitous computing. Within this reference, researchers and professionals in fields such as computer science, information technology, education, and library science will find a detailed discussion of implementing ubiquitous technologies in a variety of organizations and situations.

Three Essays on Analyzing and Managing Online Consumer Behavior

Three Essays on Analyzing and Managing Online Consumer Behavior PDF Author: Eva Maria Anderl
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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Book Description