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This study investigates whether and how answerers' location information can bias the askers' knowledge adoption decisions in online Q&A communities. Drawing on the theories underlying in-group favoritism, we propose that home bias can exist due to categorization and the expectation of better reciprocity from in-group members. We leverage the location disclosure in an online Q&A community in China as a natural experiment setting to identify home bias in knowledge adoption. We find that askers are more likely to adopt answers provided by answerers in the same location after the location disclosure. Moreover, the moderation/heterogeneity analysis suggests: (1) location information serves as a cue related to credibility, and askers rely less on it when other factors signal the answerers' credibility, and (2) askers are more favorable toward answerers in the same location when adopting an answer is associated with an expectation of better reciprocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the environment continues to deteriorate, for managers, the means of shifting consumer behavior to "green" is urgently needed. Information disclosure as a tactic to promote green consumption has been widely studied, which typically stimulates demand for new green products through cost disclosure. In contrast, the impact of environmental benefit information disclosure on green consumption, especially on online reuse platforms, remains to be ascertained. In this study, we examine the economic effects of a green disclosure nudge through a natural experiment. Drawing on daily sales data, we find that the green disclosure nudge can stimulate consumer demand and generate economic benefits. We provide suggestive evidence that this positive effect stems from an increase in consumers’ perceptions of the functional and symbolic value of used products, respectively. In addition, exploratory analysis shows that the nudge may have potential social benefits. The findings provide practical and theoretical implications for promoting green consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using extended-reality (XR) simulation to replicate physical surroundings has become increasingly prevalent in engaging online consumers with offline businesses. However, the efficacy of this XR technology remains ambiguous. To justify the huge investments in XR-related technologies, we investigate the impacts of extended surroundings on consumers’ offline engagement with associated businesses. Specifically, we utilize a natural experimental design on a leading housing platform that applies XR simulation to present the surrounding environment of housing estates. By combining propensity score matching and difference-in-differences, our findings indicate that extended surroundings increase consumer offline engagement outcomes, particularly word-of-mouth volume, and valence. Furthermore, we examine the heterogeneous effects moderated by three business characteristics. To our knowledge, this is the first to examine the impacts of XR simulation of extended surroundings. Therefore, this research offers significant implications for the literature and practice related to XR and omnichannel marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global climate changes, sea level rising, storm activity intensification, and increasing anthropogenic pressure are causing the activation of destructive processes along the coasts of the World Ocean. The corresponding processes are appeared at the most dangerous rates within the coastal barriers. Within the Black Sea, the total length of coastal barriers is 990 km, 703 km of which are within Ukraine. Corresponding barriers develop in conditions of active wave action and a general deficit of sediments. The maximum height of the relevany formations does not exceed 2.0 - 2.5 m, and the width is 200 - 250 m. The given barriers' morphometry does not contribute to the formation within their limits of large-scale coastal eolian forms, which perform the function of reserve sediments accumulation, protect and stabilize the coast. Accordingly, it is important to study the natural conditions of the Black Sea coastal barriers in order to determine the prospects for the implementation of natural coastal protection. The relevant studies were conducted within the Kinburnska-Pokrovska-Dovhiy barrier. The research aim is to determine the suitability of the Kinburnska-Pokrovska-Dovhiy coastal barrier natural conditions for the controlled creation of an artificial foredune as an element of the natural coastal protection system. Following research objectives would facilitate the achievement of this aim: - identifying the natural features of the researched barrier; - investigating the experience of previous works on the creation of artificial foredune; - analyzing the previous results on the creation of an artificial aeolian form - determining the prospects for the creation of artificial aeolian forms within the Black Sea coastal barriers. The research object is the coastal zone of the Kinburnska-Pokrovska-Dovhiy coastal barrier. The research subject is the analysis of the experiment results on the creation of an artificial aeolian form, as a justification for the implementation of natural coastal protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We set out to understand quasi-experimentation, as a research methodology in an organizational context in the field of innovation management. Quasi-experiments have the studies participants nonrandomly assigned to the experimental conditions. This can lead to selection bias and other internal validity problems. Through quasi-experimentation, the researcher can identify the cause of selection bias approach the experiment accordingly. We conduct a systematic review of the experiments published in top 10 journals in the field of innovation management in the decade 2011-2021. Altogether 372 papers were identified through searching for 'experiments' within abstracts, titles and keywords. We did a content review of the papers to identify only 23 experiments, half of which were quasi-experiments and one fourth were natural experiments. Only half of the quasi- and natural experiments concerned selection bias, but they all used at least a single type of experimental design element helpful in dealing with selection bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how the behavior of software developers changes in response to removing gamification elements from GitHub, an online platform for collaborative programming and software development. We find that the unannounced removal of daily activity streak counters from the user interface (from user profile pages) was followed by significant changes in behavior. Long-running streaks of activity were abandoned and became less common. Weekend activity decreased and days in which developers made a single contribution became less common. Synchronization of streaking behavior in the platform's social network also decreased, suggesting that gamification is a powerful channel for social influence. Focusing on a set of software developers that were publicly pursuing a goal to make contributions for 100 days in a row, we find that some of these developers abandon this quest following the removal of the public streak counter. Our findings provide evidence for the significant impact of gamification on the behavior of developers on large collaborative programming and software development platforms. They urge caution: gamification can steer the behavior of software developers in unexpected and unwanted directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we examine the effect of mobile app unbundling on new app adoption and post-adoption engagement from the perspective of path dependency theory that views unbundling results as a function of users' pre-unbundling experiences. To identify the impact of unbundling on individual usage behavior, we exploit a natural experiment in which one app unbundles a feature and launches it as a new app while another app keeps the bundled app. Our results provide empirical evidences of a causal relationship between mobile app unbundling and users' adoption decisions and post-adoption engagements. First, we find robust evidence that unbundling on average generates user churn while enhancing adopters' post-adoption engagement volume. Second, we find that usage regularity and the recency effect facilitate the unbundling results. Our findings elucidate adoption and post-adoption engagement mechanisms in a mobile app unbundling context, enabling targeting schemes that mobile app providers can utilize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we examine the business impact of social media participation on individual seller's sales activities, exploiting a natural experiment wherein a large social marketplace for second-hand goods (Xianyu) unexpectedly removed its social media features (Fishponds). We leverage a novel dataset capturing both social media participation and sales activities for individual sellers, comprising of more than180,000 transactions during a multi-week period around the event. Our results consistently demonstrate that sellers who initially participated in social media channel experienced a significant decline in their sales after the channel shutdown. Exploring heterogeneity in the effects around a variety of seller and product listing features, we find evidence consistent with the notion that the sellers who benefit most from social media participation are those who face the greatest difficulty establishing trust with buyers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voice-based AI systems are gradually deployed to replace traditional interactive voice response systems in call centers. However, there is little evidence on how the implementation of AI systems impacts customer behavior as well as the effect of AI systems on call center performance. Using data from a natural field experiment, we examine how the introduction of voice-based AI in a large telecommunication services call center affects call length, customers’ demands for human service, and customer complaints. We find that the implementation of AI significantly increases call length and decreases customer complaints. Although presumably the AI-enhanced service system reduces users’ efforts to transfer to human agents, we do not find a significant increase in customers’ demands for human service. In addition, regarding simple service tasks, the AI-enhanced service system reduces customer complaints for both experienced and inexperienced customers. For relatively complex tasks, customers learn from prior experience of interacting with the AI system; as this learning effect leads to the decrease of complaints. What’s more, our results suggest significant heterogeneity in the effects of the AI-enhanced service system by indicating that the AI-enhanced system has a significantly larger effect on reducing customer complaints for older and female customers as well as for the customers who are experienced in using the IVR system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to satisfy more patients with various demands, online healthcare community started to integrate the online and offline channels, where patients can consult healthcare providers online, be diagnosed in the hospital or service provider's office, communicate with the provider face to face, and, finally, make online inquiries about follow-up and recovery anytime and anywhere. In this study, we seek to quantify the effects of channel integration on service providers in the online health communities, noting that it is not altogether clear how the online-offline channel integration will affect e-healthcare providers' performance, including their demand of each channel and social reputation. And we further explore the moderating roles of provider-specific characteristics. We study the questions in the context of an online healthcare community website which has implemented the online-offline channel integration in China, collecting an eight-month panel data set. Leveraging a difference-in-differences analysis with various matching techniques, our results reveal several interesting findings: 1) the online-offline integration leads to increases in online demand for e-healthcare providers yet decreases in the offline demand for providers; 2) the online-offline integration improves the professional reputation of participating e-healthcare providers; 3) there are multiple providers' characteristics that moderate the main effects, such as providers' profession titles, location, and medical specialization. This work helps answer research questions concerning the online-offline channel integration as an antecedent to healthcare provider performance measures and various provider-level heterogeneities, which offers valuable design implications for online health communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incivility between members is a major concern for many online communities. This paper provides empirical evidence that sleep deprivation is an important cause of incivility in online communities. Identification comes from the shift to Daylight Saving Time (DST) which leads to individuals experiencing reduced sleep time. Using an archival dataset from English Wikipedia and an annotated corpus, we train machine learning algorithms to automatically identify personal attack, aggressive, and toxic comments. We show that compared to other days, about 22% more uncivil messages originate from the impacted regions on the Mondays following the switch to DST. We also find that the effect is stronger for incivility on article talk pages compared with incivility on user talk pages. We discuss the strategies that can mitigate the harms to online communities due to sleep deprivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many e-commerce platforms have established extensive networks of last-mile stations as their logistics infrastructure. In this study, we investigate how this last-mile infrastructure may serve as an offline platform for commercial activities (e.g., free sample distribution) to connect customers and merchants. In collaboration with Alibaba, we design two large-scale experimental studies and provide the first evidence on how platforms can leverage the walk-in traffic (organic interaction) and prompt nearby customers through online intervention (induced interactions) to improve customers' online engagement with the merchants and offline utilization of logistics infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the recent popularity of Augmented Reality (AR) technology, no empirical evidence has confirmed that AR is a more effective artifact than the traditional way of product presentations on online retailers. In this study, we investigate the economic impact of AR in terms of product sales, and the volume, valence and linguistic features of product reviews. To build up credible causal evaluation, we design a natural experiment on Amazon and collect product information and consumer reviews for 423 AR-enabled products and 2,346 non-AR products from Amazon iOS app and its website, over a period of 24 weeks. We set up the data analysis with a difference-in-differences estimation. This study aims to contribute to Information System and Marketing literature and provide practical implications for online retailers looking to adopt AR technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sharing economy reshapes the distribution of unused or underutilized asset through digital platform to individuals who are willing to pay for the services. The new economy model has introduced dramatic impact on the traditional industries by matching the demand and supply in real time. In this paper, we examine how the entry of Uber, a ridesharing services digital platform, influences the demand of public transportation. Significant debate has surrounded whether the new ride-sharing model siphoned riders from public transit, or made transit feasible for more riders. However, limited empirical research has been done to uncover whether Uber is helping or hurting public transportation system. Leveraging a natural experiment setting, the entry of Uber, with a difference-in-differences approach, we find a significant drop in the number of passenger trips with bus. Further, our results suggest that the effect of Uber is not uniform - the reduction in bus passenger trips is mitigated when the proportion of old age people is large; the decrease is amplified when population of disable people, including with language difficulty, and self-employed people are large. However, the moderating effect of poverty is mixed. We discuss the implications for research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the effects of a major incident, which exposed the social conflicts and inequality in China, on public opinion. I exploit the coincidence between the "My Dad is Li Gang" incident and the administration of China General Social Survey (CGSS) in 2010. Following a natural experiment approach, I find that the incident itself changed people's perceptions of social conflicts - those interviewed after the incident considered the conflicts to be more severe. There were significant interactions between specific media use and the incident on people's perceptions of social and personal equality, as well as trust in local government and officials. Different mediums had different effects: radio, newspaper, and the Internet negatively impacted people's perceptions or trust; the use of magazine after the incident was found to be positively correlated with perception of equality. This study offers an empirical investigation in an understudied area, and suggests an approach with high internal validity to study opinion change caused by a single incident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of behavioral explanations have been identified to account for the empirical observation that individuals tend to inefficiently shy away from making certain decisions. We introduce a new bias, "Definitivity Avoidance" (DA), that induces individuals to avoid choices that involve a final judgment. This bias denotes situations in which an agent prefers to avoid making definitive decisions (i.e., those that involve a final judgment). This kind of behavior may play an essential role in several applications in economics and finance. For instance, a bank's choice of rolling over debt for a poorly performing firm involves postponing a final decision instead of forcing the firm to file for bankruptcy. Indeed, numerous finance papers (e.g., Bernanke, 1989; Carey et al., 2012) have identified inefficiently high rates of debt rollover, thus suggesting that these decisions could be subject to systematic biases. Similarly, closing an investment position even in the presence of noisy signals definitively precludes capturing a possible upside, and this option could appear less attractive than leaving the position open, with the idea of eventually closing it when uncertainty declines.6 Also, in judicial systems with 'double jeopardy' provisions, acquittals are more definitive as they cannot be appealed. Indeed, anecdotal evidence by legal scholars (e.g., Leipold, 2005) highlights surprisingly high conviction rates in jury trials. Along these lines, Westman (1991) has highlighted the social costs of the puzzling length of foster care for children, arguing that this is due to the reluctance of court officials to make "definitive decisions ". After having modeled the effects of DA, we show that the introduction of a decision review system that allows a third party to review the correctness of decisions significantly affects decision makers' propensity to make definitive choices, if and only if they are characterized by this bias. More precisely, we exploit a unique natural experiment - the introduction of a technology-assisted review system in professional tennis - to test the model implications and confirm the relevance of this behavioral bias in a competitive setting. The results of the empirical analysis subsequently permit us to derive welfare implications. In particular, we show that a review system that increases the share of definitive decisions always leads to a welfare improvement, unless it more than offsets a decision maker's initial DA by inducing her to become excessively definitivity loving (i.e., having a strict preference for definitive decisions over nondefinitive ones). Even in this latter case, welfare can improve as long as the precision of the information received by the agents that are affected by the decision is sufficiently high, and the cost of invoking a challenge is sufficiently low in relation to the accuracy of the review technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper exploits the natural experiment of German reunification to study the consequences of regime change for social mobility. I analyze whether the associations between social origin and labor market outcomes differ between German men and women who entered the labor market after reunification based on in which of the two German states they lived before reunification. I find no such differences, neither in the pure associations between social origin and labor market outcomes nor in these associations controlling for the moderating role of educational attainment. These findings imply that social origin is a valuable asset on the German labor market independent of in which German state someone grew up. More generally, these results suggest that the intergenerational transmission of advantage is largely unaffected by political change and economic transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the causal effect of witnessing political protests on future civic engagement and political attitudes, with a special focus on the impact of 12 political protests in Hong Kong from 2012-2013 on visitors from Mainland China. The problem is important in the age of globalization, since people from authoritarian state have much more opportunities to physically experience the democratic countries; previous research nevertheless barely consider the problem and did not make causal analysis. We leverage a natural experiment design. The burst of a protest offers an exogenous variation: visitors who happened to be in Hong Kong at the dates of protests, and who visited Hong Kong before/after the protests will be averagely similar except that the formal may see the protest, while the latter cannot. We use check-in history from multiple Social Networking Sites(SNS) to determine when and where users of SNS visited Hong Kong. We use over 20 million users' posts in SNS and automatically analyze their political opinions. The result shows that witnesses of protests significantly speak more (25%) politics in SNS after the protest. Witnesses do not significantly change their support for democracy; they however showed less distrust of claims of protestors comparing with non-witnesses. The result reveals a spillover effect of protests on non-participants; it also reveals complex nature of democracy diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schooling has been proposed to be a "social vaccine" against HIV/AIDS, especially for adolescent girls who are particularly at risk for new infection. While the literature indicates a strong association between schooling and HIV, it has been unable to control for additional factors, such as socio-economic status, that predict both schooling and likelihood of HIV infection. In this paper I deal with the endogeneity of schooling by taking advantage of a natural experiment, the implementation of Universal Primary Education policies in Malawi and Uganda in the mid 1990s. I use data from the most recent Demographic Health Surveys in Malawi (2010) and Uganda (2011) and model the relationship between primary schooling and adult HIV status using an instrumented fuzzy regression discontinuity approach. The results indicate that in Malawi a one year increase in schooling for a girl leads to a 6-7 percent reduction in probability of testing positive for HIV as an adult and in Uganda a one year increase in schooling leads to a 2-4 percent reduction in probability of testing positive for HIV as an adult. In a series of supplementary analyses a number of potential pathways through which such effects may occur are explored. Findings indicate increased exposure to primary school affects overall schooling attainment and effects adolescent sexual behavior to some extent. However primary schooling has no effect on recent (adult) sexual behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet technology enables virtual collaboration and plays an important role in knowledge production. However, collaborative technology will not function without conducive underlying social mechanisms. Previous research mostly investigates individual-level motivations of editors, with only a few exceptions examining the collaboration relationships. In this paper, we take a structural perspective and investigate the impact of positions (centralities) of editors in the collaboration networks on their efforts and effort allocations. To achieve this, we empirically reconstruct the dynamic collaboration network of Chinese Wikipedia for the period between 2002 and 2007. Based on a dynamic view of the network, we compose a panel data set that covers both the contribution behavior and network position characteristics of Wikipedia editors. We strengthen our causal interpretation by leveraging the exogenous block that prevented Wikipedia editors in Mainland China from accessing the website. We find distinctive effort allocation patterns that strongly correlate with network centrality measures. This confirms theoretical predictions derived in recent developments in network economics and social network theories. This research enhances our understanding about how collaboration network structure shapes individuals' behavior in online collaboration platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Transport traffic safety depends on many factors. The efficiency of the vehicle braking is one of them. It depends on the reaction of the driver, the braking system, the quality of tires, the characteristics of the road surface. The 3D vehicle with the hydraulic braking system and disc brake with the wheel has been investigated. The dynamic models of the disk brake assembly and the wheel have been constructed. The dynamic models of disk brake evaluate elastic, damping and frictional properties of the pad and the hosting. The dynamic model of the 3D vehicle takes the dynamic properties of the suspension and the tyre, the tyre-road friction coefficient, which depends on the longitudinal tyre slip and the linear velocity of the wheel, into account. The systems of equations of dynamic models' motions are solved by numerical methods. The dynamic characteristics of the braking system of the automobile are obtained. The results of extremal braking tests and calculations are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In all branches of the industry, especially in power engineering, thin wall steel structures are extensively used. The land vertical cylindrical steel tanks are very popular examples of such structures. The manufacture and assembling of these structures are usually accompanied by deviations from a perfect cylindrical form. Therefore, exact evaluation of the real local imperfections and common deviations from the analytical model of the tank is very important for such potentially dangerous structures. The main objectives of the presented investigations are: to describe some results of experiments of thin plates with defect; to identify stress strain state by using the finite element method; to make the comparison between experimental results and FEM results. The final remarks and conclusions have been presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how the entry of gig-economy platforms influences local entrepreneurial activity. On one hand, such platforms may reduce entrepreneurial activity by offering a stable employment for the un- and under-employed. On the other hand, such platforms may enable entrepreneurship by offering work flexibility that allows the entrepreneur to re- deploy resources strategically in order to pursue her nascent venture. To resolve this tension we exploit a set of natural experiments, the entry of the ride-sharing platform Uber X and the on-demand delivery platform Postmates. We examine the effect of each on crowdfunding campaign launches at Kickstarter, the world's largest reward-based crowdfunding platform. Results indicate a significant negative effect on crowdfunding campaign launches, and thus local entrepreneurship, after platform entry. Strikingly, the effect appears to accrue primarily to un-funded and under-funded projects, suggesting that gig-economy platforms predominantly reduce necessity- based entrepreneurship by offering viable employment for the un- and under- employed. Finally, our results point to an associated increase in overall employment, suggesting the existence of significant economic spillovers that result from the influx of excess capital created by the platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) influences the allocation of procurement contracts. To obtain exogenous variation in companies' social engagement, I exploit a quasi-natural experiment provided by the enactment of state-level constituency statutes, which allow directors to consider stakeholders' interests when making business decisions. Using constituency statutes as instrumental variable (IV) for CSR, I find that companies with higher CSR receive more procurement contracts. The effect is stronger for more complex contracts and in the early years of the government-company relationship, suggesting that CSR helps mitigate information asymmetries by signaling non-opportunistic behavior and trustworthiness. In addition, I find that the effect is stronger in competitive industries, indicating that CSR can serve as a differentiation strategy to compete against other bidders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The virtues or lack thereof, of pay-for-performance schemes remain controversial. In our view this can be traced to at least two distinct issues: the lack of clarity on the benchmark to which such schemes are being compared, and the difficulty of making causal inferences from naturally occurring data. We attempt to make progress on both sets of issues in this paper. We build a formal theory explicitly comparing the differences in collaborative behavior under pay-for-performance and fixed-wage schemes. We also exploit a natural experiment in a South-Korean e-commerce company in which precisely this transformation in incentive scheme was carried out, but in which the order of implementation of the transformation was randomized across employees. As per our theoretical predictions, our results suggest that individuals receive more help from their team peers as the fraction of team peers who have been switched from pay-for-performance to fixed-wage schemes increases, and that this effect is stronger for individuals in teams with potentially high synergies. However, the observed behavior may not be fully consistent with self-centered rationality; individuals who have lower productivity seem to be the greatest recipients of help. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]