This paper investigates how friendship relationships act as pipes, prisms, and herding signals in a large online Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending site. By analyzing decisions of lenders, we find that friends of the borrower, especially close offline friends, act as financial “pipes” by lending...

A key to the content diversity on user-generated content platforms is what subjects users choose to contribute on. This research investigates how two factors can shape contributors’ subject choice decisions, namely, the amount of existing content and content contributed by online friends, or...

User-generated online reviews are crucial for consumer decision-making, but suffer from under- provision, quality degradation, and imbalances across products. This research investigates whether “friend contributions cues,” in the form of highlighted reviews written by online friends, can...

Inconclusive findings about the effect of national cultural differences on post-acquisition performance may be created by the failure to distinguish among the different cultural dimensions and the asymmetry of cultural differences. To demonstrate a different approach, this study focuses on one...

We offer a theory and measure for determining powerful nodal positions based on potential inter-actor control in “politically charged” networks, which contain both allies and adversaries. Power is derived from actors that are dependent on the focal actor and sociometrically weak, either due...