Online knowledge exchange platforms have become an important IT artifact that empowers online learning for the Internet users. A key challenge for knowledge exchange platforms is how to motivate the desirable user engagement behaviors. Based on the motivation theory and the equity theory, we...

To help consumers evaluate products that often differ along multiple dimensions, many online review platforms have started to implement multi-dimensional rating systems, wherein a user provides product ratings on multiple product dimensions, in addition to an overall product rating. In contrast...

To understand the effect of increasingly popular, multi-dimensional online reviews on product sales, we extend the overall-rating-based analysis by incorporating multi-dimensional ratings to examine how multi-dimensional review evaluations affect product sales for niche vs. mainstream products....

By allowing individuals to engage in remote relationships with foreign employers, online labor markets have the potential to mitigate the inefficiency costs due to the legal barriers and other frictions deterring international physical migration. This study investigates how the supply of foreign...

A significant body of literature in information systems, marketing, and economics has shown the important implication of the distinction between experience products and search products (“product type”) on consumer information search, marketplace design, and firm strategy. However, how to...

Online referral systems help firms attract new customers and expand their customer base by leveraging the social relationships of existing customers. We integrate ultimatum game theory, which focuses on fairness, with motivation theories to investigate the effects of social distance and monetary...

The traditional measure of consumer surplus (CS) (willingness to pay minus price paid) is captured at the time the transaction takes place, implicitly assuming that actual quality received (ex-post) is identical to quality expected (ex-ante). However, when the exchange of goods does not occur...

When product or service quality cannot be well-specified ex-ante because of uncertainty and information asymmetry, consumer surplus (CS) is not well-defined or known ex-ante. Traditional measures of CS have implicitly assumed that the quality expected is the same as the quality that is paid for....

Visionaries have conjectured that the world is becoming a level playing field due to the Internet that allows people to connect from anywhere around the globe. We examine this “flat world” conjecture in the context of online labor markets by theoretically proposing and empirically...

Online product ratings offer information on product quality. Scholars have recently proposed the potential of designing multi-dimensional rating systems to better convey information on multiple dimensions of products. This study investigates whether and how multi-dimensional rating systems...