Managerial responses to online customer reviews not only affect customers who receive the responses but may also influence subsequent customers who observe the responses. This externality arises ...because of the public nature of online interactions. However, prior studies were mainly in offline settings where such externality rarely exists. In this study, we assess the magnitude of such externality. Using a difference-in-difference-in-differences framework and matched hotels across two large travel agencies, we find that managerial responses indeed have a significant and positive impact on the
volume
of subsequent customer reviews. The impact on the review
valence
is not evident, which can be attributed to the unique design of identity disclosure in our research context. Furthermore, our results suggest nuances that were not known in the prior literature. For example, responding to positive and negative reviews may have different effects on future reviews, and managers should provide detailed responses to negative reviews but brief ones to positive reviews. Our results offer managerial implications to service providers on how to improve customer engagement in the interconnected online environment.
The online appendix is available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2018.0781
.
An extensive literature in economics and finance has documented
home bias
, the tendency that transactions are more likely to occur between parties in the same geographical area rather than outside. ...Using data from a large online crowdfunding marketplace and employing a quasi-experimental design, we find evidence that home bias still exists in this virtual marketplace for financial products. Furthermore, through a series of empirical tests, we show that rationality-based explanations cannot fully explain such behavior and that behavioral reasons at least partially drive this remarkable phenomenon. As crowdfunding becomes an alternative and increasingly appealing channel for financing, a better understanding of home bias in this new context provides important managerial, practical, and policy implications.
This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation
.
We propose
information-directed sampling
—a new approach to online optimization problems in which a decision maker must balance between exploration and exploitation while learning from partial ...feedback. Each action is sampled in a manner that minimizes the ratio between squared expected single-period regret and a measure of information gain: the mutual information between the optimal action and the next observation.
We establish an expected regret bound for information-directed sampling that applies across a very general class of models and scales with the entropy of the optimal action distribution. We illustrate through simple analytic examples how information-directed sampling accounts for kinds of information that alternative approaches do not adequately address and that this can lead to dramatic performance gains. For the widely studied Bernoulli, Gaussian, and linear bandit problems, we demonstrate state-of-the-art simulation performance.
The electronic companion is available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2017.1663
.
Generating synthetic workloads is essential and critical to the performance evaluation of database systems. When benchmarking database performance for a specific application, the similarity between ...synthetic workloads and real application workloads determines the credibility of the evaluation results. However, it meets a great challenge to catch workload characteristics for a target online transaction processing (OLTP) application considering the complexity of transaction executions. To address this problem, we propose a work l o a d d u pli ca tor ( Lauca ) that can generate synthetic workloads with highly similar performance metrics compared to a specific application on both centralized and distributed databases. By carefully studying the application-driven workload generation problem, we present Transaction Logic , Data Access Distribution and Partition Access Distribution to characterize runtime workloads and propose novel generation algorithms to guarantee the high fidelity of synthetic workloads. To the best of our knowledge, Lauca is the first application-driven transactional workload generator. We conduct extensive experiments based on TPC-C, SmallBank and YCSB on both centralized and distributed databases. The experimental results show that Lauca consistently generates high-quality synthetic workloads.
By providing quick and easy access to credit, online lending platforms may help borrowers overcome financial setbacks and/or refinance high-interest debt, thereby decreasing bankruptcy filings. On ...the other hand, these platforms may cause borrowers to overextend themselves financially, leading to a “debt trap” and increasing bankruptcy filings. To investigate the impact of online lending on bankruptcy filings, we leverage variation in when state regulators granted approval for a major online lending platform—Lending Club—to issue peer-to-peer loans. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that state approval of Lending Club led to an increase in bankruptcy filings. A complementary instrumental variables analysis using loan-level data yields similar results. We find suggestive evidence that the ease of receiving a Lending Club loan causes some borrowers to overextend themselves financially, leading to bankruptcy. Our results suggest that recent initiatives from online lending platforms to control how borrowers use loans, such as Lending Club’s “balance transfer loans” that send loan funds directly to creditors, can help these platforms provide safe and affordable credit. Our study adds to the literature that examines how online platforms influence society and the economy; it contributes to the literature that examines how financial products, services, and regulations influence bankruptcy filings; and it has policy implications for online lending design and regulation.
This paper was accepted by Lorin Hitt, information systems.
This paper describes a novel architecture that aims to create a template for the implementation of an IT platform, supporting the deployment and integration of the different digital twin subsystems ...that compose a complex urban intelligence system. In more detail, the proposed Smart City IT architecture has the following main purposes: (i) facilitating the deployment of the subsystems in a cloud environment; (ii) effectively storing, integrating, managing, and sharing the huge amount of heterogeneous data acquired and produced by each subsystem, using a data lake; (iii) supporting data exchange and sharing; (iv) managing and executing workflows, to automatically coordinate and run processes; and (v) to provide and visualize the required information. A prototype of the proposed IT solution was implemented leveraging open-source frameworks and technologies, to test its functionalities and performance. The results of the tests performed in real-world settings confirmed that the proposed architecture could efficiently and easily support the deployment and integration of heterogeneous subsystems, allowing them to share and integrate their data and to select, extract, and visualize the information required by a user, as well as promoting the integration with other external systems, and defining and executing workflows to orchestrate the various subsystems involved in complex analyses and processes.
This article develops the critical concept of digital utility through studying the case of DiDi Chuxing and the platformization of transport services in urban China. By examining DiDi's business ...model, its datafication strategies, its relations with the Chinese government, and its labor management systems, the article demonstrates how the platformization of transport is emblematic of a private company becoming a digital utility provider. With technological imagination and practical inconsistency, this process remediates service delivery while reworking infrastructures and redefining the access to public and private services. We argue that platform companies are able to become digital utility suppliers because of their capacity to straddle the public and the private sectors, their aspiration to become "ecosystem builders," and their heavy reliance on the constant intensive labor of users, particularly drivers, to produce data. However, these factors also make instability a definitive feature of digital utility companies in their present condition. Morphing into the terrain of utilities is a common undertaking by DiDi and similar platform companies. To problematize the logics of digital utility, especially its labor-intensive datafication processes and its complex relations with regulators, provides a conceptual anchor for further debates on the infrastructuralization of platforms and the platformization of society.
We conducted research to understand online trade in jaguar parts and develop tools of utility for jaguars and other species. Our research took place to identify potential trade across 31 online ...platforms in Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, Chinese, and Vietnamese. We identified 230 posts from between 2009 and 2019. We screened the images of animal parts shown in search results to verify if from jaguar; 71 posts on 12 different platforms in four languages were accompanied by images identified as definitely jaguar, including a total of 125 jaguar parts (50.7% posts in Spanish, 25.4% Portuguese, 22.5% Chinese and 1.4% French). Search effort varied among languages due to staff availability. Standardizing for effort across languages by dividing number of posts advertising jaguars by search time and number of individual searches completed via term/platform combinations changed the proportions the rankings of posts adjusted for effort were led by Portuguese, Chinese, and Spanish. Teeth were the most common part; 156 posts offered at least 367 teeth and from these, 95 were assessed as definitely jaguar; 71 of which could be linked to a location, with the majority offered for sale from Mexico, China, Bolivia, and Brazil (26.8, 25.4, 16.9, and 12.7% respectively). The second most traded item, skins and derivative items were only identified from Latin America: Brazil (7), followed by Peru (6), Bolivia (3), Mexico (2 and 1 skin piece), and Nicaragua and Venezuela (1 each). Whether by number of posts or pieces, the most commonly parts were: teeth, skins/pieces of skins, heads, and bodies. Our research took place within a longer-term project to assist law enforcement in host countries to better identify potential illegal trade and presents a snapshot of online jaguar trade and methods that also may have utility for many species traded online.
Abstract
Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Real-time Kinematic (RTK) method is commonly used in Indonesia because it can produce three-dimensional position directly with accuracy of ±5 cm, ...which is transmitted from a reference station using Networked Transport of RTCM via Internet Protocol (NTRIP) communication media. InaCORS system provided by Badan Informasi Geospasial (BIG) become the easiest reference station solution with stations that is always on and spread out throughout Indonesia. The InaCORS system provides nearest RTK, virtual reference station (VRS) RTK, and online data processing (ODP) services. Currently, the Indonesia Geospasial Reference System (SRGI2013) has the epoch 2021 reference system. The aim of this research is to determine which epoch is used and the accuracy and precision of the RTK and ODP services of InaCORS. To determine this issue, this study conducted RTK nearest and RTK VRS data acquisition for 5 minutes with 1-second interval, as well as static measurement for three hours at 10 points spread out throughout Bandung. The acquired data was then compared with static data processed through CORS ITB to be considered as the true value. The compared results between the three services of the InaCORS system against the true value indicate that the InaCORS system still uses the 2012 epoch because the difference value is closer to epoch 2012 than to epoch 2021, with a difference between epochs up to 26 cm. The compared results state that ODP 3D accuracy is the highest of the three services with an accuracy of 3.93 cm because ODP process static data which is more stable than RTK data, with 3D precision of 3.97 cm. Between the RTK methods, VRS is more accurate with 3D accuracy of 5.05 cm and 3D precision of 4.03 cm. The nearest RTK method has 3D accuracy and precision respectively 5.65 and 3.87 cm, which is the best precision of all three services. Between the RTK methods, VRS can be said is better than nearest in terms of accuracy and precision, but nearest RTK is more stable and unlikely to fail in measurement than VRS.
•An elevator ride comfort monitoring method using smartphones is proposed.•The new method is stable, economic and convenient.•The new method provides technical support for public participate ...monitoring.
With rapid urbanization, the demand for elevators is increasing, and their level of safety and ride comfort under vibrating conditions has also aroused interest. It is therefore essential to monitor the ride comfort level of elevators. The traditional method for such monitoring depends significantly on regular professional inspections, and requires expensive equipment and professional skill. With this regard, a new method for elevator ride comfort monitoring using a smartphone is demonstrated herein in detail. A variety of high-precision sensors are installed in a smartphone with strong data processing and telecommunication capabilities. A series of validation tests were designed and completed, and the international organization for standardization ISO2631-1997 was applied to evaluate the level of elevator ride comfort. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is stable and reliable, its precision meets the engineering requirements, and the elevator ride comfort level can be accurately monitored under various situations. The method is very economical and convenient, and provides the possibility for the public to participate in elevator ride comfort monitoring. In addition, the method can both provide a wide range of data support and eliminate data errors to a certain extent.
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