Nowadays, people have many business activities and entertainments on a variety of online platforms. Despite their various functionalities, online platforms have a fundamental administrative problem: How do platform designers or administrators create proper online environments, including mechanisms and policies, to better manage user behaviors, in order to reach the goals of the platforms? Starting with a taxonomy of online platforms, I introduce three critical dimensions that help to characterize such platforms, including revenue model, heterogeneity in the role of users and level of user interaction. Then, I choose three online platforms as research contexts and conduct empirical studies, trying to identify and understand the impact of the incentive program, quality information disclosure, and social influence, on users' decision-making in online platforms. The first essay investigates the effectiveness of incentive hierarchies, where users achieve increasingly higher status in the community after achieving increasingly more challenging goals, in motivating user contribution in the same platform. The findings have important implications for crowd-based online applications, such as knowledge exchange and crowdsourcing. The second essay focuses on online consumer review sites, and studies whether and how consumer-generated word-of-mouth of restaurants-both volume and valence-is influenced by the disclosure of quality information from health inspectors, by conducting analytical modeling and econometric analyses using data from a leading consumer review site. The third essay examines how social interactions matter in a large-scale online social game that adopts an increasingly popular freemium revenue model. The study leverages an econometric model to quantify the effect of peer consumption on players' repeated decisions for the consumption of both free services and premium services. Finally, I conclude the dissertation by highlighting the three fundamental issues of design and management of online platforms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/621773 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Guo, Chenhui, Guo, Chenhui |
| Contributors | Goes, Paulo, Lin, Menfeng, Goes, Paulo, Lin, Mingfeng, Zhang, Bin, Gowrisankaran, Gautam |
| Publisher | The University of Arizona. |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text, Electronic Dissertation |
| Rights | Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. |
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