We explore how people balance their needs to belong and to be different from their friends by studying their choices of a virtual-house wall color on a leading Chinese social-networking site. The setting enables us to randomize both the popular color and the adoption rate at the individual level...

We examined whether people conform to or diverge from the most popular choice among their friends by conducting a large-scale field experiment on a leading social-networking site in China. Our setting allowed us to minimize confounding effects such as pre-existing taste similarities between a...

Heuristics have a ubiquitous influence on decision-making. Despite a large strand of literature on various heuristics, scant research addresses the concurrent applications of different heuristics or the interplay amongst them. Using detailed peer-to-peer (P2P) investment data from Renrendai, a...

How should crowdfunding platforms alleviate information asymmetry between creators and crowdfunders? In traditional financial markets, public companies are required to disclose potential risks to their investors, and such risk disclosure requirements are enforced by legal and fiduciary...

Web applications that feature online social networking functions have significantly influenced human social interactions. The availability of data sets on online social connections and user activities calls for innovative big-data analytic methods. This study proposes a model of tie strength in...

The ESG (environmental, social, and governance) practice has become very important in contemporary business and it is believed to have a significant impact on firm value. However, there still lacks a consensus on the underlying mechanism connecting ESG and firm value. We argue that ESG can...

CRM has traditionally referred to a company managing relationships with customers. The rise of social media, which has connected and empowered customers, challenges this fundamental raison d’etre. This paper examines how CRM needs to adapt to the rise of social media. The convergence of social...

Despite the widespread popularity of online opinion forums among consumers, the business value that such systems bring to organizations has, so far, remained an unanswered question. This paper addresses this question by studying the value of online movie ratings in forecasting motion picture...

Prior works offer compelling evidence that on the demand side of the market, user-generated online product reviews play a very important role in informing consumers' purchase decisions. On the supply side, however, the interplay between online product reviews and firm strategies is less...

Understanding the development trajectory of digital platforms is central to digital platform management. We propose to consider the multiple roles played by participants of blockchain platforms and demonstrate that adding this dimension significantly improves our understanding of platform...