The purpose of this project was to develop a Web site that would facilitate students' use of the Internet to research topics relating to the study of biology. This Web site serves as a bridge to link classroom topics to real world scientific information and research available on the Internet. Methods of preventing plagiarism and focusing Internet research were incorporated into the overall Web site design.

This dissertation is a collection of five essays examining different aspects of consumer and firm behavior in dynamic markets. The first essay combines clickstreams of users at a major news website with Facebook activity data, to study if social networks complement or compete for online browsing time. This is the first empirical study to show that Facebook activity increases time spent on news sites. Online news consumption is a shared experience, as the activity of social network friends strongly influences the behavior of other network members. We also find that visitors’ own browsing patterns are important predictors of online content consumption. The second essay examines consumer attitudes to risk and uncertainty vis-a-vis their purchase and search decisions for air tickets online. Using a two-stage model of purchase incidence and carrier choice, we find that browsing experience, search costs and product characteristics are important predictors of purchase incidence. Implications for website managers are also discussed. The third essay provides insights on the impact of customer heterogeneity and preference stochasticity on behavior based price discrimination. While customer heterogeneity intensifies competition, resulting in greater price discrimination, preference stochasticity reduces the incidence of price discrimination. Overall, the effect of preference stochasticity is more salient. The fourth essay presents models of strategic interaction to analyze the impact of dominance and concentration on pricing strategies. We show that lack of market dominance is a sufficient condition for discounts to existing customers. We further test our predictions via an experiment with pricing professionals. The behavior of professionals confirms that price discrimination increases with market dominance and concentration; however, lack of dominance is not a sufficient condition for loyalty discounts. We contend that increasing competition is a more effective means of improving consumer welfare compared to regulating dominant firms. The fifth essay considers the role of identity and customer type recognition in influencing pricing behavior in dynamic markets with symmetric and asymmetric players. When customer identity is detectable firms charge higher prices to repeat customers while new customers are offered lower prices. However, pricing behavior changes when information on customer type is available and this behavior varies with market structure. Age, education and experience of managers are also found to significantly influence pricing behavior.

Online reputation systems are certainly the most overlooked 'heroes' of today's social Web. While these mechanisms are a vital element of every online transaction, they have received less consideration than some of their more well-known cousins, such as recommender systems or social networks, whose success would often not have been possible and tenable without their discrete but active backing. It then follows that despite their value and importance, the implementation of current reputation mechanisms has mostly been the result of trial-and-error. Resting on an economic perspective, this thesis regroups three chapters whose frameworks and findings aim at helping mechanism designers and researchers understand key mechanisms at play and develop more efficient online reputation systems. The first chapter examines the optimal number of ratings a reputation mechanism must make publicly available within an online marketplace in order to minimize cheating and maximize Pareto efficiency. I develop a moral hazard stage game featuring fictitious players which has the compelling property to prevent reputation effects from disappearing in the long run. I show that the number of ratings displayed by a reputation system is a fundamental predictor of market efficiency, and that the latter number should be kept minimal in order to maximize social welfare in the market – especially for economies proposing interactions with a high profit margin. The second chapter studies how different classes of reporting behaviours commonly found online affect the reliability of a reputation mechanism. I develop an iterative stochastic approximation model which I use to construct a behavioural measure of efficiency, so-called 'reporting bias'. I demonstrate that reporting bias tends towards its maximum when raters comply with the reports left by their predecessors. Following this result, I recommend to keep the rating interface separated from the rest of the reputation system. I also find that fake ratings are particularly harmful when one type of behaviour is present in the economy and suggest to counterbalance sybil attacks by displaying pairs of contrasted ratings. Finally, I defend the use of the arithmetic mean against the median as a way to compute reputation scores. The third chapter analyses how 5-star rating scales can lead to the formation of bimodal distributions of ratings within online marketplaces. Using a 2-time period model featuring altruistic raters, I identify the existence of a 'blind spot' of unrated transactions whose magnitude increases in the cost of rating and decreases in the number of buyers inhabiting the economy. Developing an additional model featuring Bayesian agents suffering from confirmatory bias, I show that non-binary rating scales can leave space to ambiguity and possibly wrong posteriors, even in the long run. Overall, results of the chapter hint that fine-grained rating scales best suit signalling reputation systems while coarse-grained scales should be preferred for sanctioning mechanisms.

The question of how the Internet affects existing geo-cultural or geo-linguistic communities in relation to nation-states has continued to receive attention among academics and policymakers alike. Language-based technologies and services that aggregate, index, and distribute materials online may reshape pre-existing boundaries of the relationship between users and content, for instance with different language versions of user-generated encyclopaedias or different local versions of search engines. By comparing two major Chinese online encyclopaedias, Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia, this thesis investigates whether the Internet overcomes, shifts, or reinforces boundaries among Chinese language users. The Chinese language provides an excellent case for examining the boundary question. While the Internet can potentially connect the largest number of native speakers around the world, the majority (i.e. those from mainland China) face an Internet censorship and filtering regime that may limit this very potential. Modern Chinese history has also complicated the cultural-political boundaries among the regions of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. This thesis compares the conditions and outcomes of their respective editorial processes, content features, and users’ reception. Multiple findings emerge from a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including content analysis, webometrics, and search engine result visibility tests. These methods show that boundaries are drawn in the process of creating, linking, and searching content on the Chinese Internet. Their geolinguistic extent differs, a phenomenon that reflects the cultural-political division between mainland China and the rest of Chinese-speaking world. Both the findings and methods of the thesis have important implications for research and policy for understanding the globalizing regionalization and nationalization effects of the Internet.

Internet content and Internet users are becoming more linguistically diverse as more people speaking different languages come online and produce content on user-generated content platforms. Several platforms have emerged as truly global platforms with users speaking many different languages and coming from around the world. It is now possible to study human behavior on these platforms using the digital trace data the platforms make available about the content people are authoring. Network literature suggests that people cluster together by language, but also that there is a small average path length between any two people on most Internet platforms (including two speakers of different languages). If so, multilingual users may play critical roles as bridges or brokers on these platforms by connecting clusters of monolingual users together across languages. The large differences in the content available in different languages online underscores the importance of such roles. This thesis studies the roles of multilingual users and platform design on two large, user-generated content platforms: Wikipedia and Twitter. It finds that language has a strong role structuring each platform, that multilingual users do act as linguistic bridges subject to certain limitations, that the size of a language correlates with the roles its speakers play in cross-language connections, and that there is a correlation between activity and multilingualism. In contrast to the general understanding in linguistics of high levels of multilingualism offline, this thesis finds relatively low levels of multilingualism on Twitter (11%) and Wikipedia (15%). The findings have implications for both platform design and social network theory. The findings suggest design strategies to increase multilingualism online through the identification and promotion of multilingual starter tasks, the discovery of related other-language information, and the promotion of user choice in linguistic filtering. While weak-ties have received much attention in the social networks literature, cross-language ties are often not distinguished from same-language weak ties. This thesis finds that cross-language ties are similar to same-language weak ties in that both connect distant parts of the network, have limited bandwidth, and yet transfer a non-trivial amount of information when considered in aggregate. At the same time, cross-language ties are distinct from same-language weak ties for the purposes of information diffusion. In general cross-language ties are smaller in number than same-language ties, but each cross-language tie may convey more diverse information given the large differences in the content available in different languages and the relative ease with which a multilingual speaker may access content in multiple languages compared to a monolingual speaker.

Telecommunications policy debates concerning the contentious issue of net neutrality have revolved around a number of broadband network operator behaviors, including discriminatory traffic management – differential treatment of network traffic associated with different Internet applications for the purpose of managing performance. Some stakeholders have advocated for regulatory intervention to prevent network operators from discriminating to the detriment of independent application innovation. Others would prefer to rely on competition between network operators to discipline operator behavior. Fixed-line broadband markets in the United Kingdom and the United States have differed substantially with respect to discrimination, competition, and regulation. The UK has experienced intense competition and pervasive discriminatory traffic management without triggering regulatory activity. The US has seen much less discrimination, limited competition, and regulatory threat followed by regulatory intervention. This thesis uses elite interviews, participant observation, and documentary analysis in a comparative study of these two cases between the mid-2000s and 2011 to determine why network operators take up discriminatory traffic management (or not) and how competition and the regulatory environment affect traffic management outcomes. This thesis demonstrates that network operators take up discriminatory traffic management primarily to control cost, performance, or both. Competition promotes rather than deters discrimination because it drives broadband prices down, encouraging operators to manage high-volume applications whose traffic incurs high costs. Regulatory threat can be sufficient to counteract these desires, but in its absence and without concerns vocalized by interest groups, discriminatory approaches endure. Telecommunications regulators intervene to safeguard nondiscrimination when they conceive of their remits as encompassing social and industrial policymaking, are ambivalent about litigation risk, and are driven by their leaders’ reputational agendas, as in the case of the Federal Communications Commission. With a narrower perception of its remit and more concern for its organizational reputation, Ofcom exemplifies the characteristics that inhibit traffic management regulation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2003. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on May 7, 2006). Includes bibliographical references (p. 297-304).

This study examines the ways in which public participation in the production of scientific knowledge, influences the practices and expertise of the scientists in Galaxy Zoo, an online Big Data citizen science initiative. The need for citizen science in the field of Astronomy arose in response to the challenges of rapid advances in data gathering technologies, which demanded pattern recognition capabilities that were too advanced for existing computer algorithms. To address these challenges, Galaxy Zoo scientists recruited volunteers through their online website, a strategy which proved to be remarkably reliable and efficient. In doing so, they opened up the boundaries of scientific processes to the public. This shift has led to important outcomes in terms of the scientific discovery of new Astronomical objects; the creation and refining of scientific practices; and the development of new forms of expertise among key actors while they continue to pursue their scientific goals. This thesis attempts to answer the over-arching research question: How is citizen science shaping the practices and expertise of Galaxy Zoo scientists? The emergence of new practices and development of the expertise in the domain of managing citizen science projects were observed through following the work of the Galaxy Zoo scientists and in particular the Principal Investigator and the project's Technical Lead, from February 2010 to April 2013. A broadly ethnographic approach was taken, which allowed the study to be sensitive to the uncertainty and unprecedented events that characterised the development of Galaxy Zoo as a pioneering project in the field of data-intensive citizen science. Unstructured interviewing was the major source of data on the work of the PI and TL; while the communication between these participants, the broader Science Team and their inter-institutional collaborators was captured through analyses of the team emailing list, their official blog and their social media posts. The process of data analysis was informed by an initial conceptualisation of Galaxy Zoo as a knowledge production system and the concept of knowledge object (Knorr-Cetina,1999), as an unfolding epistemic entity, became a primary analytical tool. Since the direction and future of Galaxy Zoo involved addressing new challenges, the study demanded periodic recursive analysis of the conceptual framework and the knowledge objects of both Galaxy Zoo and the present examination of its development. The key findings were as follows. The involvement of public volunteers shaped the practices of the Science Team, while they pursued robust scientific outcomes. Changes included: negotiating collaborations; designing the classification tasks for the volunteers; re-examining data reduction methods and data release policies; disseminating results; creating new epistemic communities; and science communication. In addition, new kinds of expertise involved in running Galaxy Zoo were identified. The relational and adaptive aspects of expertise were seen as important. It was therefore proposed that the development of the expertise in running citizen science projects should be recognised as a domain-expertise in its own right. In Galaxy Zoo, the development of the expertise could be attributed to a combined understanding of: the design principles of doing good science; innovation in methods; and creating a dialogic space for scientists and volunteers. The empirical and theoretical implications of this study therefore lie in (i) identifying emergent practices in citizen science while prioritising scientific knowledge production and (ii) a re-examination of expertise for science in the emerging context of data-intensive science.

M.Phil / Citing is the process by which scholars give recognition to research used by another academic researcher. Citation resources are tools used by academic scholars for keeping track of who did what research and the impact of the research within the discipline. Citation analysis is therefore an attempt to measure the impact and contribution of a study to the body of knowledge and research. Citation tracking and citation analysis is facilitated by making use of information resources which specialize in citations and tools for conducting citation analysis. The citation resource by The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), Web of Science (WOS), was traditionally the citation tool of choice of academics for more than 40 years. The arrival in 2004 of Scopus, a fee-based citation resource, and Google Scholar (GS), a citation resource available for free and accessible via the Web, presented WOS with competition. The prolific growth of the citation resources created new opportunities for academics in citation tracking and citation analysis. The question of which citation resource to use in the process of tracking citations and conducting citation analysis posed a challenge to librarians and information professionals at academic institutions. It became essential to establish which citation resource was not only most relevant to use for which subject discipline, but which was the most cost-effective with the advent of shrinking library budgets. Therefore the need arose for citation resources to be compared with the aim of establishing whether the newcomers Scopus and GS are substitutes for or complementary to the traditional WOS. The objectives of this study included comparing WOS, Scopus and GS in order to determine whether evaluation criteria existed for citation resources, to define scholarly environmental sciences journals within a South African context, to determine which citation resource presented the most comprehensive citation coverage of the South African scholarly environmental sciences journals, to determine whether GS could be considered a substitute for the fee-based citation resources WOS and Scopus, and to determine how the content of the exported data for the journal sample population compared in terms of content completeness and quality. The research study consisted of a detailed literature review, followed by an empirical component using a comparative research design and the technique of purposive non-probability sampling in order to define the sample population for the study. The South African scholarly environmental sciences journals internationally accredited during the period 2004-2008 were chosen as the sample target population. The study consisted of a pilot study and three measuring instruments that were compiled based on the literature review. The results of the macro-level evaluation established that Scopus surpasses both WOS and GS. On the other hand, the micro-level evaluation concluded that WOS surpasses Scopus and GS. The content verification process conducted determined that Scopus and WOS both surpass GS. These findings were presented at the 12th Annual World Wide Web Applications conference in September 2010. The study was able to establish that GS is not a substitute for WOS and/or Scopus for the South African scholarly environmental sciences journals. In addition, it was concluded that GS can be used as a supplementary citation resource to the fee-based citation resources WOS and Scopus. It was further determined that the citation resource Scopus can be considered a substitute for WOS, which was traditionally the citation resource of choice of academic researchers.

Product markets have been found to be socially constructed as industry logics, product ontologies and organising visions. Information intermediaries play an important field-level role in determining the categories and ontologies of emerging products. Within shared cognitive structures, sellers and buyers come together in mutual understandings on how products are used, what features are important and what counts as value. Although market information is often legitimated through objective scientific methodologies, it can also appear as uncertain knowledge, or rumour. Contrary to the often seen conception of rumour as crowd-like behavioural contagion, it is presented here as an informal message lacking a reliable sponsor that is developed in an uncertain situation, but still may be subject to critical reasoning. This thesis investigates the ambiguity around the fuzzy front-end of product markets, as social media and blogs that trade in rumour and proposition before any official announcement by firms. Through a process of improvised news, these online collectivities, as product publics, deliberate and collectively generate expectations as meaning structures. By tracking discourse from tech blogs, I trace the emergence of meaning in the tablet device product ontology. This occurred well before product introductions by firms who eventually came to form the market.