学术论文

This paper studies how social media affects the dynamics of protests and strikes in China during 2009–2017. Based on 13.2 billion microblog posts, we use tweets and retweets to measure social media communication across cities and exploit its rapid expansion for identification. We find that, despite strict government censorship, Chinese social media has a sizeable effect on the geographical spread of protests and strikes. Furthermore, social media communication considerably expands the scope of protests by spreading events across different causes (e.g., from anticorruption protests to environmental protests) and dramatically increases the probability of far‐reaching protest waves with simultaneous events occurring in many cities. These effects arise even though Chinese social media barely circulates content that explicitly helps organize protests.

We present a tractable model that accommodates asset-market sentiment in a standard Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) setting, allowing us to quantitatively evaluate sentiment-driven macroeconomic fluctuations. In our model, changes in households' perceived uncertainty about housing prices lead to self-fulfilling fluctuations in housing prices, which then impact investment and output through entrepreneurs' collateral constraints. Household sentiment shocks hence are transmitted and propagated to the macroeconomy, generating boom–bust cycles. Uncertainty, housing prices, and the real economy are linked. Quantitatively, the sentiment shock in the form of risk–panic is a crucial driver of business cycle fluctuations despite the presence of various competing shocks.

Online video platforms face the challenge of balancing the needs of their users with those of their advertisers. Although users typically prefer to have less intrusive ads, advertisers aim to effectively catch user attention. This paper investigates how the provision of ad choice affects the effectiveness of video advertising. We argue that allowing users to choose an ad to view may trigger a “conjecture-formation-and-confirmation” process that motivates users to pay more attention to the selected ad. Two online experiments and four laboratory experiments are conducted to test the theorized underlying mechanism of the ad choice effect. Study 1 finds when users are unfamiliar (versus familiar) with the content of ad options (i.e., they need to make conjectures about ad content), ad choice is more likely to increase user attention to the chosen ad. Study 2 and Study 3 show that the impact of ad choice on user attention is more likely to be positive when users are enabled to make conjectures about ad content, such as when choice options provide more relevant information about ad content. Study 4a and Study 4b provide more direct support for the underlying mechanism by showing that the ad choice effect is attenuated when users cannot form conjectures about ad content at the choice stage. Study 5 further demonstrates that the positive effect of ad choice is robust across different ad settings. Taken together, these studies show ad choice is more likely to boost the effectiveness of video advertising when the “conjecture-formation-and-confirmation” process is triggered.

Innovative firms must trade off disclosing to investors and maintaining secrecy from competitors. We study this trade-off in a sample of IP licenses mandatorily disclosed by US public firms, whose contents can be temporarily redacted. Hand classifying the redacted information, we find that firms with valuable IP in competitive markets redact IP information more often. Markets react positively to the redaction of IP information, consistent with theoretical predictions rationalizing a separating equilibrium in which nondisclosure signals more valuable IP. Our results suggest that credible nondisclosure partially resolves information frictions for innovative public firms when facilitated by sophisticated investors.

This study estimates the direct and spillover effects of a free education programme on educational outcomes in rural China. We find that, although the programme encourages more eligible children to attend secondary school, it also leads to a decrease in high school enrolment among ineligible girls with eligible siblings, as they are more likely to choose work instead. In the long run, males exposed to free education have more years of schooling than their non-exposed counterparts. However, such effect is not found among females. This disparity suggests that a gender-neutral policy may have an asymmetric effect between males and females because of spillover effects through intra-household resource allocation.

We build on AGM belief revision (Alchourrón et al. (1985)) and propose a class of updating rules called pragmatic rules. Pragmatic updating applies to multiple priors and requires that the agent's posteriors be the subset of her priors under which the realized event occurs with probability 1, if such priors exist. We construct a propositional language based on qualitative probability and demonstrate the strong relation between belief updating rules and belief revision rules in this language. We show that an updating rule is consistent with AGM belief revision if and only if it is pragmatic. While maximum likelihood updating is pragmatic in general, full-Bayesian updating is not. We characterize maximum likelihood updating within the AGM framework, and show that full-Bayesian updating can be obtained by dropping one of AGM's postulates.

We introduce a learning model in which the decision maker does not know how recommendations are generated, called the contraction rule. We present behavioral postulates that characterize it. The contraction rule can be uniquely identified and reveals how the decision maker interprets and how much she trusts the recommendation. In a dynamic stationary setting, we show that the contraction rule is not dominated by completely following recommendations and is incompatible with a property called compliance with balanced recommendations. Following this negative result, we demonstrate that the contraction rule may generate and reinforce recency bias and disagreement.

Many mobile applications use push notifications and reminders to explicitly educate, remind, and motivate users to perform healthy behaviors. However, users do not always act according to these explicit digital interventions. Our study investigates whether users’ self-regulation can be implicitly facilitated with a proper mobile interaction design. Specifically, we investigate the impacts of two touch modes that are supported by force-based interaction technology, that is, pressing and tapping. Drawing on the theory of embodied cognition, which suggests that people automatically infer meanings from their bodily actions, we conjecture that pressing, compared with tapping, enhances self-regulation because the action of pressing on the touchscreen embodies resolute approach motivation toward goals. We test our hypotheses in three experiments. The first experiment investigates beverage choices on a mobile app; the second experiment examines goal setting on a fitness app; and the third experiment focuses on personal hygiene learning on a mobile education app. The results from the three experiments show that pressing actions can improve users’ self-regulation in selecting a healthier but less tasty beverage (Study 1), setting higher exercise goals and performing more physical exercise (Study 2), and reducing lapses in maintaining personal hygiene (Study 3). In addition, such effects were more salient among users with a higher level of health knowledge and a promotion-focused health orientation. This study contributes to healthcare IT research by showing that mobile interaction can be leveraged to nudge users toward enhanced self-regulation.

是项研究为一个针对拉引营销活动如何影响多元渠道企业有效地推行营销活动的整合分析。高度灵活的拉引营销活动，目标是令多元分销渠道组合更具吸引力。作者透过整合以往的多元渠道分销文献，研究营销活动是否有效，与拉引营销活动及其分销渠道结构的配置，以及客户、竞争及产品类别的关系。是项分析结合研究样本的企业、数据和模型属性，发现当多元渠道企业在所有分销渠道中使用数码广告和价格促销时，营销活动更有效。跨渠道价格歧视并不会令营销活动更有效。此外，数码广告和价格促销是否配合多元化的渠道、渠道的丰富性、客户体验、市场竞争力和产品消费频率，也会对有效推行营销活动造成影响。