Online users often need to make adoption decisions without accurate information about the product values. An informational cascade occurs when it is optimal for an online user, having observed others' actions, to follow the adoption decision of the preceding individual without regard to his own...

A thorough understanding of the mechanisms of ion crossover through the membranes in vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs) is critically important in making improvements to the battery’s efficiency and cycling performance. In this work, we develop a 2-D VRFB model to investigate the mechanisms...

Western Australia is a resource-rich province. Since the 1890s, resources booms have played a key role in the development of the state's economy. In the last few years, Western Australia's resources industry has continued to enjoy exceptional conditions created by strong international demand for...

Sentiment classification seeks to identify general attitude of a piece of text of comments or reviews on certain subject, be it positive or negative. Most existing researches on sentiment classification employ supervised learning approaches that rely on annotated data. However, sentiment is...

It is well known that the Internet has significantly reduced consumers'search costs online. But relatively little is known about how searchcosts affect consumer demand structure in online markets. In this paper,we identify the impact of search costs on firm competition and marketstructure by...

This dissertation investigates the impact of online product information on consumers, firms and markets. The first chapter of this dissertation proves that better access to product information increases consumer demand and their willingness-to-pay, leading to a new era where firms can charge...