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...

The literature of private provision of public goods suggests that incentive to contribute is inversely related to group size. This paper empirically tests this relationship using field data from Chinese Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. We exploit an exogenous reduction in group size as a...

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...

The literature on the private provision of public goods suggests an inverse relationship between incentives to contribute and group size. We find, however, that after an exogenous reduction of group size at Chinese Wikipedia, the nonblocked contributors decrease their contributions by 42.8...

In this paper, we study the effect of collaboration network structure on editors' contribution behavior in Wikipedia. Collaboration in Wikipedia is organized around articles, and any two editors co-editing an article have a collaborative relationship. Based on economic theories about network...

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...