Online crowdfunding has received a great deal of attention as a promising avenue to foster entrepreneurship and innovation. Because online settings bring increased visibility and traceability of transactions, many crowdfunding platforms provide mechanisms that enable a campaign contributor to...

Biases in online platforms pose a threat to social inclusion. We examine the influence of a novel source of bias in online philanthropic lending, namely that associated with religious differences. We first propose a measure of religion distance between pairs of countries, which we incorporate...

Civic crowdfunding is an emerging subgenre of crowdfunding wherein citizens contribute to financing civic projects that bring value to their community. Civic crowdfunding projects are oriented around community development, such as educational initiatives, transportation improvement and...

We examine how the entry of gig-economy platforms influences local entrepreneurial activity. On one hand, such platforms may reduce entrepreneurial activity by offering stable employment for the un- and under-employed. On the other hand, such platforms may enable entrepreneurial activity by...

We empirically examine and quantify network effects on a large online dating platform in Brazil. We consider the effects of a seeding intervention by the platform operator, wherein it acquired its primary competitor and subsequently imported the competitor's 150,000 user accounts over a 3-day...

In hopes of motivating consumers to provide larger volumes of useful reviews, many retailers offer financial incentives. Here, we explore an alternative approach, social norms, wherein we inform people about the volume of reviews authored by peers. We test the effectiveness of using financial...

Through a large-scale field study of 166,215 online restaurant reviews, we found evidence of a distance boosting effect, whereby experiencing spatial distance (i.e., authoring a review about a geographically distant restaurant, rather than proximate one) and temporal distance (i.e., authoring a...

Online crowdfunding has received a great deal of attention from entrepreneurs and policymakers as a promising avenue to fostering entrepreneurship and innovation. A notable aspect of this shift from an offline to an online setting is that it brings increased visibility and traceability of...

We design a series of online performance feedback interventions that aim to motivate the production of user-generated content (UGC). Drawing on social value orientation (SVO) theory, we develop a novel set of alternative feedback message framings, aligned with cooperation (i.e., your content...