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The existing scholarship has developed six main explanations to account for the success of the Chinese Revolution, which has been anomalous for major paradigms derived from cross-national comparisons. Methodologically, we use a social geographical approach to test these existing explanations systematically by constructing and analyzing a unique dataset of Communist growth in 93 counties in the three most contested provinces during its most pivotal period of ascendence. Theoretically, we advance and test an alternative perspective, based on the groundwork of Tocqueville and Fei Xiaotong, that integrates the state-centric theory, elite theory, and cultural analysis. Our perspective emphasizes the interplay between state centralization and local elite structure, which leads to intensified state extraction and local elite fracturing, thus creating favorable conditions for revolution. The quantitative analysis strongly supports the importance of the Japanese invasion but provides limited support for many other conventional explanations. The analysis largely confirms the Tocqueville-Fei perspective on state centralization, elite fracturing, cultural change, and revolution. The findings are buttressed by a detailed case study of Lianshui County. The study unveils a common structural challenge that a modernizing state faces in an agrarian status society, to recreate its political legitimacy while disrupting local elite structure. It also sheds historical light on the evolution of state-society relationship through the Chinese Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We empirically examine the effectiveness of referral marketing and price promotion in generating sales in a large e-commerce platform. Our results show that although referral marketing increases sales, its effect is attenuated by price promotion. We argue that price promotion arouses quality concerns and undermines the credibility of online paid referrals in a weak-tie environment. This finding implies diminishing marginal returns for referral marketing and price promotion spending. We conduct a battery of validation tests to support our argument. Our research highlights the importance of scrutinizing the complementarity of marketing promotions in the unique context of the Internet. Depending on the persuasiveness of the brand and the promotional channel, promotional strategies may conflict in addressing consumers' quality concerns. Our findings suggest that marketing managers should use discretion in combining online referral marketing and price promotion. We advise sellers against using both marketing tactics if they lack a strong brand image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how daily labor supply responds to unanticipated earnings shocks among Singapore's taxi drivers using a novel identification strategy that uses idiosyncratic variation in booking cancellations and passenger no-shows (CNS) that drivers repeatedly receive. Our results provide new and more compelling evidence in support of the income-targeting model of labor supply. Not only are the average responses on the extensive margin consistent with the income-targeting model, but the responses on the intensive margin and the heterogeneous responses at different income levels and across driver characteristics are as well. We find that drivers work longer and earn more per hour following CNS, and the effects are robust after controlling for rich fixed effects, market supply and demand conditions, and drivers' sunk cost of time. The CNS effects on ending a shift exhibit a U-shaped pattern, are strongest when cumulative income is close to the average shift income, and become insignificant when the income level is too low or too high. The effects are most pronounced in the first hour of CNS and fade away quickly afterward. Drivers achieve higher productivity by reducing break time, taking more jobs, driving faster, driving to places with more earning opportunities, and having more time with passengers on board. Drivers choose the response strategies that are complementary to their abilities and circumstances such as schedule flexibility and potential for productivity improvement: those with flexible working schedules tend to prolong their shifts, whereas those with flexible earnings rates tend to increase their subsequent productivity. Our novel identification strategy strengthens the empirical literature on daily labor supply, and our findings of heterogeneity effects offer new insights on income-targeting behaviors. This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing. Funding: This work was supported by a Singapore Ministry of Education Social Science Research Thematic Grant [GrantMOE2016-SSRTG-059]. Supplemental Material: Data and the online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4349. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops a new dynamic choice modeling framework and applies it to examine owner decisions in P2P sharing markets. Peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing marketplaces enable sharing of idle resources. When a renter requests an owner's resource, the owner needs to decide whether to accept the request: accepting it helps the owner fill up the idle periods of the resource and generate a payoff but reduces the flexibility to serve a future request for a longer duration. This paper develops a framework to uncover the tradeoffs faced by owners on these platforms when making acceptance decisions, which can be used by owners to optimize their decisions and by platforms to improve their operations. The model explicitly accommodates two types of owners: some are attentive to the availability states of their cars and forward-looking, whereas others myopically make the acceptance decisions. Applying the model to unique data from a leading peer-to-peer car sharing platform in China, we obtain similar sizes of both types of owners and find that female, experienced, and younger owners are more likely to be strategic. The results also reveal the differentiated preferences of the two types of owners toward their renters. Building on model estimates, we calibrate the option value of each day in the future (i.e., the value of having the day available) for strategic owners and find it to first increase, then decrease. Two counterfactual analyses are conducted. The first analysis shows that if the platform imposes a minimum rental duration, strategic owners may become more reluctant to accept requests, even if the current availability state entails a higher expected payoff. The second analysis shows that with better understanding of its owners, the platform can greatly improve the matching efficiency by optimal (re)allocation of rental requests, a move that benefits almost all participants in the business. History: K. Sudhir served as the senior editor for this article. Funding: This work was supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University [Grant A0038957] and the National University of Singapore [Research Grant R-316-000-104-133]. Supplemental Material: Data and the online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2022.1369. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a correction notice for an article titled "The misruling elites: the state, local elites, and the social geography of the Chinese Revolution." The authors of the article have decided to make it an Open Access publication under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The copyright of the article has been changed to ©The Authors 2024. The document also includes information about obtaining permission for the use of third-party material. Springer Nature, the publisher, remains neutral in terms of jurisdictional claims and institutional affiliations. [Extracted from the article]

Bargaining is an important pricing mechanism, prevalent in both online and offline markets. However, there is little empirical work documenting the costs and benefits of bargaining, primarily because of the lack of real-world bargaining data. We leverage rich, transaction-level bargaining data from a major online platform and supplement it with primary data to quantify the costs and benefits of bargaining for sellers, buyers, and the platform. We do this by building a structural model of buyer demand and seller pricing decisions while allowing for the existence of bargaining initiation cost, loss-of-face cost, and price discrimination. Using our results, we perform three policy simulations to quantify the importance of not distinguishing between no-bargain and failed-bargain transactions, ignoring the loss-of-face cost, and not allowing for bargaining. These simulations provide rich details on how the various costs of bargaining impact our understanding of buyer and seller behavior and transaction outcomes. Banning bargaining, in particular, benefits the buyer and the platform greatly but only has a modest benefit for sellers. Finally, we show that our results are robust to our assumptions and replicate in another product category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The geographic associations of brands and branding have been well demonstrated in the country-of-origin (COO) effect literature in that a product's COO has a branding effect and consumers have preferences for goods from specific countries. The aggregation of these preferences can lead to unique and asymmetric trading patterns between countries. In this paper, we extend the geographic associations of brands and branding to domestic trade and document that seller provinces have a branding effect and geographic preference asymmetries can arise within peer-to-peer trade networks such as Taobao in China. We find that while buyers in one province in China are willing to purchase goods from sellers in another province, it is often the case that the relationship is not reciprocal. This asymmetry in preferences persists after controlling for time-varying factors at both buyer and seller locations. Like brands, a location therefore serves as a quality cue and reputation mechanism for the unobserved attributes of sellers, products, and logistics services from that location. We then explore factors that might be correlated with these time-invariant preferences across provinces. We find that in addition to the gravity effect of distance and the home-bias effect, other factors such as dyadic trust; migration; similarities in ethnicities; occupations and education levels; and levels of marketization and rule of law are correlated with the asymmetries. Notably, these factors differ from those identified in a contemporaneous study of eBay in the US, in which religiosity and political ideology contribute to the differences (Elfenbein et al. 2018). We believe that the Chinese and the US experiences differ because the two countries differ substantially in social, economic, political, religious, legal, and commercial environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dockless bike sharing provides a convenient and affordable means of transport for urban residents. It solves the "last-mile problem" in public transport by reducing the travel cost between home and subway stations and thus increasing the attractiveness of distant apartments. This may affect the relationship between housing price and distance to subway and reduce the price premium enjoyed by proximate apartments. Using resale apartment data in 10 major cities in China, a difference-in-differences approach at the apartment level, and a two-step estimator at the city-month level, we find that the entry of bike sharing reduces the housing price premium by 29% per km away from a subway station. The effect is equivalent to a reduction of 1,893–2,127 CNY (282–317 USD) in commuting costs per household per annum over 30 years. The effect is driven by a relative increase in the listing price of, and in the demand for, apartments distant from vis-à-vis proximate to subway stations. This paper was accepted by Juanjuan Zhang, marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project compiled 463,530 instrumental observations of daily temperature, precipitation and sunshine at up to 319 stations in China between 1912 and 1951. The principal sources are monthly reports of the Institute of Meteorology, Nanjing, observatories in Japanese‐occupied Manchuria, and the Japanese Army in North China. Gross errors, rounding errors and inhomogeneities are identified. The new dataset is temporally and spatially consistent with existing datasets of monthly temperature, but reports higher precipitation and sunshine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four theories on the economic rationale for warranty provision have been proposed in the literature: (1) Warranties provide insurance to customers and work as a risk-sharing mechanism, (2) warranties are a sorting mechanism and work as a means for second-degree price discrimination among customers with different risk preferences, (3) warranties work as a signal of product quality to consumers under information asymmetry, and (4) warranties work as an incentive mechanism for firms to reveal and improve product quality. The authors examine the conditions under which each theory would apply and derive testable implications from the data. They then assess whether these theories have empirical support in the U.S. computer server and automobile markets in the context of manufacturer base warranties. The results indicate that in both markets, warranties primarily provide customers with insurance against product failure, and warranties of different durations work as a sorting mechanism across customers with different levels of risk aversion. Warranties are not used to signal product quality or to provide an incentive for manufacturers to reveal or improve product quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluating proposed changes in channels of distribution and matching products to channels in multichannel product markets are difficult tasks for the management of any company. Such policy-oriented issues cannot be addressed easily by methods such as controlled experiments in test markets, which are feasible methods for evaluating pricing and advertising decisions, or by using historical sales/profits data. In this article, the authors show how the framework of structural modeling and policy simulations can be used to evaluate such policy changes. They also show how to assess the economic value of each channel to each firm and to its customers. They apply such policy simulations to the personal computer market, which is characterized by multiple firms competing through various channels using multiple products. The analysis quantifies the profit impact on firms and the welfare impact on consumers of many proposed channel actions and provides an economic rationale for different actions observed in this marketplace, such as decisions to add or drop marketing channels. The authors also simulate the effects of the Hewlett-Packard–Compaq merger but go beyond a standard merger analysis by evaluating the effects of various potential channel actions co-incident with the merger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We exploit China's heating policy to investigate how nonlabor income affects marriage. From the mid-1950s, the policy gave substantial subsidies to urban residents north of the Huai River. Applying geographic regression discontinuity, we find that with the policy, urban men in the north married 15 months earlier than men in the south. The difference is substantial given that the average age at first marriage is 24.9 years for urban men in the south. The effect is larger for later birth cohorts, which is consistent with the progressive implementation of the policy. The effect is smaller among women, consistent with women having less power in the household than men. There is no effect among rural residents, who did not benefit from the heating policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) platforms have become a major engine of growth in Internet commerce. This is especially true in countries such as China, which are experiencing a big rush toward e-commerce. The emergence of such platforms gives researchers the unique opportunity to investigate the evolution of such platforms by focusing on the growth of both buyers and sellers. In this research, we build a utility-based model to quantify both cross and direct network effects on Alibaba Group's Taobao.com, the world's largest online C2C platform (based in China). Specifically, we investigate the relative contributions of different factors that affect the growth of buyers and sellers on the platform. Our results suggest that the direct network effects do not play a big role in the platform's growth (we detect a small positive direct network effect on buyer growth and no direct network effect on seller growth). More importantly, we find a significant, large and positive cross-network effect on both sides of the platform. In other words, the installed base of either side of the platform has propelled the growth of the other side (and thus the overall growth). Interestingly, this cross-network effect is asymmetric with the installed base of sellers having a much larger effect on the growth of buyers than vice versa. The growth in the number of buyers is driven primarily by the seller's installed base and product variety with increasing importance of product variety. The growth in the number of sellers is driven by buyer's installed base, buyer quality, and product price with increasing importance of buyer quality. We also investigate the nature of these cross-network effects over time. We find that the cross-network effect of sellers on buyers increases and then decreases to reach a stable level. By contrast, the cross-network effect of buyers on sellers is relatively stable. We discuss the policy implications of these findings for C2C platforms in general and Taobao in particular. Data, as supplemental material, are available at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Platforms refer to intermediaries that facilitate economic interaction between two sets of agents wherein the decisions of one set of agents are likely to have an effect on the other via direct and/or indirect externalities. Given their nature, platforms need to find the appropriate balance between the competing objectives of agents and act as catalysts by facilitating the beneficial effects of externalities. In this paper, we discuss the current theoretical and empirical literature on two-sided platforms. We then identify three dimensions that offer opportunities to advance the empirical literature: (a) unanswered theoretical and conceptual questions, (b) data-related opportunities, and (c) methodological challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We quantify the economic value of hardware base warranties in the U.S. server market to manufacturers, channel intermediaries, and customers. We further decompose the value of a warranty into its insurance value and its price discrimination value, which are the two main rationales for warranty provision in the server market. We use structural modeling and counterfactual experiments to accomplish the empirical task. We derive our demand model from utility maximization, which accounts for a customer's risk aversion behavior and heterogeneity. We obtain our pricing model from the profit maximization behavior of manufacturers and down-stream firms in indirect channels, accounting for the institutional realities in the server market. Our empirical analysis uses quarterly data from 1999 to 2004 on server wholesale prices, retail prices, and sales for direct and indirect channels in the U.S. market. We find that manufacturers and downstream firms benefit from warranty provision and from sorting across heterogeneous customers by offering a menu of warranties. Customers also benefit from manufacturer warranty provision as well as from the menu of warranties offered. The insurance value of warranties increases and the price discrimination value of warranties decreases with warranty duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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