1,720,989 research outputs found
Economics of Customer and Provider Information in Digital Platforms
No full textWe examine the strategic implications of rating schemes in online marketplaces and peerto-peer platforms. In traditional online marketplaces, multi-dimensional rating scheme
is superior to the single-dimensional rating scheme in reducing consumers’ uncertainty
about the value of a product when consumers have heterogeneous preferences regarding
the product quality attributes. However, we show that, when sellers respond to product
ratings by adjusting their prices, the multi-dimensional rating scheme does not always
benefit consumers. The main driver of the results is that the multi-dimensional ratings
amplify the consumers’ perceptions of any underlying differentiation in the attributes of
competing products, while simultaneously exposing the similarity between the products if
they are homogeneous. Therefore, the rating scheme alters the heterogeneity in consumer
perceptions and utility, which, in turn, affects the upstream price competition. In peerto-peer markets, many platforms use a bilateral review scheme in which both consumers
and providers rate each other, unlike the more prevalent unilateral review scheme in which
only consumers rate providers. We show that if the proportion of the low-cost consumers is
less than a threshold, consumers are better off, the platform is worse off, and the providers
are worse off under the bilateral review scheme than the unilateral review scheme. The
key driver for these results is that the price competition between providers for the low-cost
consumers can be fundamentally different under the different review schemes; the price
competition affects the consumer preference for a provider and hence the match between
consumers and providers, which ultimately determines the payoffs to participants and the
social welfare. Our findings also contribute to the adverse selection literature by identifying
the critical role played by demand and supply conditions on the impact of adverse selectio
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Essays on the Economics of Membership-Based Free Shipping Programs in Online Marketplaces
No full textThe rapid growth of e-commerce and the importance of shipping in the context of online retailing have motivated online retailers to introduce the membership-based free shipping programs (MFS) programs in which retail platforms bear the shipping costs for purchases made
by members that have paid an upfront fee. In spite of the popularity of such programs and
the exemplary success of Amazon Prime, the mechanisms and implications of MFS have not
been thoroughly investigated. In this dissertation, we study the economics of membershipbased free shipping programs in online marketplaces from three distinct perspectives and
provide insights to better leverage such programs in the online retailing industry.
In the first chapter, we examine the strategic implications of MFS. We find that the membership fee collected by a platform does not even cover the shipping cost. However, MFS can
benefit the platform because of its positive impacts on price and demand. Consumers, on
the other hand, are not necessarily better off, despite higher level of consumption. Moreover,
MFS could hurt the society because it may overstimulate demand from low value transactions and thus incur social waste. Our results imply that MFS cannot be simply considered
as a pure shipping cost transfer mechanism; online retailers who aim to benefit from it should
take into consideration the strategic benefits of it.
In the second chapter, we identify the strategic relationship between an online retailer’s
consumer-side MFS adoption and its supplier-side business model shift from the agency
model of selling, where a retailer allows a manufacturer to sell on the retailer site for a
commission on the sale price, to the wholesale resale model, where the retailer buys from the
manufacturer at a wholesale price and resells to consumers at a retail price. We find that
such shift enhances the value of MFS to the retailer in the sense the retailer gains more from
MFS and MFS is profitable to the retailer in a larger region of the parameter space under
the agency model than the wholesale model. The retailer’s gain from MFS comes at the
expense of consumers and the society under the wholesale model, but the consumers and the
society can also benefit from MFS under the agency model. The key driver of these results
is that, under the wholesale model, MFS increases the severity of the double-marginalization
problem because of larger retailer’s marginal cost; however, under the agency model, MFS
reduces the impact of marginalization at the manufacturer end because the manufacturer
faces consumers with smaller purchasing cost on average.
In the last chapter, we focus on MFS in the context of platform competition. We would
like to understand how MFS serves as an innovative marketing tool that grants unique
competitive advantages and how competition in turn influences the adoption of MFS. By
analyzing online retailers’ MFS decisions in a competitive environment, we show that low
shipping cost generally encourages the adoption of MFS that could benefit the adopter in
terms of price, demand, and market share. Online retailers, however, are not necessarily
better off with MFS. Particularly when shipping cost is attractive to induce MFS adoption
on both sides but not low enough to justify the profitability, online retailers fall into prisoner’s
dilemma where they are forced to adopt MFS that ends up hurting them both. Moreover,
our analysis suggests that MFS is more likely to appear in the presence of competition than
in a monopoly scenario, which provides a reasonable explanation to firms’ growing interest
toward and the striking popularity of MFS
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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