This article studies the inclusion of sponsored results in recommendations, observed in many information gatekeepers including Internet search engines, travel experts, credit raters, radio deejays, and movie critics, which are an essential entry point for many information search and decision...

The practice of sponsored search advertising - where advertisers pay a fee to appear alongside particularWeb search results - is now one of the largest and fastest growing source of revenue for Web search engines. We model and compare several mechanisms for allocating sponsored slots, including...

Background: We examine the signaling effect of borrowers’ social media behavior, especially self-disclosure behavior, on the default probability of money borrowers on a peer-to-peer (P2P) lending site. Method: We use a unique dataset that combines loan data from a large P2P lending site with...

The sale of genuinely branded products through unauthorized channels (also known as gray markets) is a growing problem for many firms that operate in separate markets. It is generally believed that the existence of such unauthorized sales will cannibalize the profits of brand owners. In this...

Motivated by the enormous growth of keyword advertising, this paper explores the design of unit-price contract auctions, in which bidders bid their unit prices, and the winner is chosen based on both their bids and performance levels. The previous literature in unit-price contract auctions...

Prior works offer compelling evidence that on the demand side of the market, user-generated online product reviews play a very important role in informing consumers' purchase decisions. On the supply side, however, the interplay between online product reviews and firm strategies is less...

In this thesis, we study two important features of themarketplace based internet economy-the emergence of informationgatekeepers and the use of auction-like mechanisms to allocate andprice goods sold on the internet.The first essay ``One Auction or Two? Auction with Multiple-units"discusses the...

Background: We examine the signaling effect of borrowers' social media behavior, especially self-disclosure behavior, on the default probability of money borrowers on a peer-to-peer (P2P) lending site. Method: We use a unique dataset that combines loan data from a large P2P lending site with the...

Fresh agricultural commodities have been entering the era of network marketing. However, the coverage population is still relatively small. In this paper, more than 400 online shopping customer survey data are statistically analyzed based on perceived risk multidimensional model by factor...

We examine how the system of “federalism, Chinese style” functions in the context of land allocation. China’s land laws give provision of land a central role in local officials’ growth promotion strategies. Requisitions of farmland by local authorities have engendered significant rural...