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Community rules play a key part in enabling or constraining the behaviors of members in online communities. However, little is unknown regarding whether and to what degree changing rules actually affects community dynamics. In this paper, we seek to understand how these behavior-governing rules shape the interactions between users, as well as the structure of their discussion. Using the top communities on Reddit (i.e. subreddits), we first contribute a taxonomy of behavior-based rule categories across Reddit. Then, we use a network analysis perspective to discover how changing implementation of different rule categories affects subreddits' user interaction and discussion networks over a 1.5 year period. Our study find several significant effects, including greater clustering among users when subreddits increase rules focused on structural regulation and how restricting allowable content surprisingly leads to more interactions between users. Our findings contribute to research in proactive moderation through rule setting, as well as lend valuable insights for online community designers and moderators to achieve desired community dynamics.

We conduct a study of hiring bias on a simulation platform where we ask Amazon MTurk participants to make hiring decisions for a mathematically intensive task. Our findings suggest hiring biases against Black workers and less attractive workers and preferences towards Asian workers female workers and more attractive workers. We also show that certain UI designs including provision of candidates information at the individual level and reducing the number of choices can significantly reduce discrimination. However provision of candidates information at the subgroup level can increase discrimination. The results have practical implications for designing better online freelance marketplaces., Comment: 11 page, 2 figures, 38rd ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2020

We designed and ran an experiment to test how often people's choices are reversed by others' recommendations when facing different levels of confirmation and conformity pressures. In our experiment participants were first asked to provide their preferences between pairs of items. They were then asked to make second choices about the same pairs with knowledge of others' preferences. Our results show that others people's opinions significantly sway people's own choices. The influence is stronger when people are required to make their second decision sometime later (22.4%) than immediately (14.1%). Moreover, people are most likely to reverse their choices when facing a moderate number of opposing opinions. Finally, the time people spend making the first decision significantly predicts whether they will reverse their decisions later on, while demographics such as age and gender do not. These results have implications for consumer behavior research as well as online marketing strategies.