Online brand communities can be valuable to firms, but how do firms cultivate such communities? We find that engagement, that is, ‘likes' in response to firm posts, in the online brand community is associated with subsequent growth in the community. We theorize that when individuals engage...

Online platforms are prone to abuse and manipulations from strategic parties. For example, social media and review websites suffer from sentiment manipulations, manifested in the form of opinion spam and fake reviews. The consequence of such manipulations is the deterioration of information...

This paper studies the strategic network formation in a location-based social network. We build an empirical model of social link creation that incorporates individual characteristics and pairwise user similarities. Specifically, we define four user proximity measures from biography, geography,...

The performance of prediction markets depends crucially on the quality of user contribution. A social media-based prediction market can utilize aspects of social effects to improve users' contribution quality. Drawing upon literature from diverse areas such as prediction markets, knowledge...

Question-Answer (Q&A) forums are gaining popularity as a user-engagement tool to drive traffic on multi-service portals. In a platform market model, demand-side users seek answers from the supply-side users, since such answers can indicate value offered, reduce buyer uncertainty and offer social...

Firms of all sizes are trying to “join the conversation” on social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, and are increasingly trademarking hashtags related to their products and brands. This new practice of trademarking hashtags has produced an important opportunity for empirical...