Feng Zhu

• Harvard University

Conformity toward the majority choice among a user’s friends on a social-networking site first decreases and then increases with the adoption rate of that choice.

Research Summary This paper studies the impact of platform‐owner entry threat on complementors in platform‐based markets. We examine how app developers on the Android mobile platform adjust innovation efforts (rate and direction) and value‐capture strategies in response to the threat of Google’s entry into their markets. We find that after Google’s...

We explore how people balance their needs to belong and to be different from their friends by studying their choices of a virtual-house wall color on a leading Chinese social networking site. The setting enables us to randomize both the popular color and the adoption rate at the individual level so that our experimental design minimizes information...

As platform owners continue to expand their ecosystems, many of them have started to provide consumers with their own complementary applications. These moves position the platform owners as direct competitors to their complementors. This paper surveys empirical studies that examine the direct entry of platform owners into complementors’ product spa...

Research summary Platform owners sometimes enter complementors’ product spaces and compete against them. Using data from Amazon.com to study Amazon’s entry pattern into third‐party sellers’ product spaces, we find that Amazon is more likely to target successful product spaces. We also find that Amazon is less likely to enter product spaces that req...

We examine how reducing search frictions in secondary markets affects the value appropriated by firms in primary markets. We characterize two effects on primary market firms caused by intermediaries entering secondary markets: the ‘cannibalization’ and ‘option value’ effects. Separation between primary and secondary markets can drive which of the t...

We examine how reducing search frictions in secondary markets affects the value appropriated by firms in primary markets. We characterize two effects on primary market firms caused by intermediaries entering secondary markets: the ‘cannibalization’ and ‘option value’ effects. Separation between primary and secondary markets can drive which of the t...

How do firms respond to entry in multi-sided markets? We address this question by studying the impact of Craigslist, a website providing classified-advertising services, on local U.S. newspapers. We exploit temporal and geographical variation in Craigslist's entry to show that newspapers with greater reliance on classified-ad revenue experience a l...

This paper provides the first formal model of business model innovation. Our analysis focuses on sponsor-based business model innovations where a firm monetizes its product through sponsors rather than setting prices to its customer base. We analyze strategic interactions between an innovative entrant and an incumbent where the incumbent may imitat...

This paper provides the first formal model of business model innovation. Our analysis focuses on sponsor-based business model innovations where a firm monetizes its product through sponsors rather than setting prices to its customer base. We analyze strategic interactions between an innovative entrant and an incumbent where the incumbent may imitat...

We provide a simple model of a three-sided market. In a departure from existing models of two-sided markets, our model highlights that an increase in competition on one side does not necessarily increase prices on other sides. The direction of a price change depends on the interdependency across different sides. The comparative statics from our mod...

We examine whether collective intelligence helps achieve a neutral point of view using data from a decade of Wikipedia’s articles on US politics. Our null hypothesis builds on Linus’ Law, often expressed as “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Our findings are consistent with a narrow interpretation of Linus’ Law, namely, a greater number...

Many scholars argue that when incentivized by ad revenue, content providers are more likely to tailor their content to attract “eyeballs,” and as a result, popular content may be excessively supplied. We empirically test this prediction by taking advantage of the launch of an ad-revenue-sharing program initiated by a major Chinese portal site in Se...

This study empirically examines whether Wikipedia has a neutral point of view. It develops a method for measuring the slant of 28 thousand articles about US politics. In its earliest years, Wikipedia's political entries lean Democrat on average. The slant diminishes during Wikipedia's decade of experience. This change does not arise primarily from...

This paper examines the relative importance of platform quality, indirect network effects, and consumer expectations on the success of entrants in platform-based markets. We develop a theoretical model and find that an entrant's success depends on the strength of indirect network effects and on the consumers' discount factor for future applications...

Many scholars argue that content providers, when incentivized by ad revenue, are more likely to tailor their content to attract “eyeballs,” and as a result, popular content may be excessively supplied. We empirically test this prediction by taking advantage of the launch of an ad-revenue-sharing program initiated by a major Chinese portal site in S...

The literature on the private provision of public goods suggests an inverse relationship between incentives to contribute and group size. We find, however, that after an exogenous reduction of group size at Chinese Wikipedia, the nonblocked contributors decrease their contributions by 42.8 percent on average. We attribute the cause to social effect...

This paper examines the compatibility incentives of two competing networks in a setting where the networks can choose fee-based or ad-sponsored business models and the sources of differentiation come from both network products and their users. In contrast to the prior literature, we find that the networks have no incentives to be compatible when th...

This paper examines how product and consumer characteristics moderate the influence of online consumer reviews on product sales using data from the video game industry. The findings indicate that online reviews are more influential for less popular games and games whose players have greater Internet experience. The paper shows differential impact o...

This article examines how product and consumer characteristics moderate the influence of online consumer reviews on product sales using data from the video game industry. The findings indicate that online reviews are more influential for less popular games and games whose players have greater Internet experience. The article shows differential impa...

We analyze the optimal strategy of a high-quality incumbent that faces a low-quality ad-sponsored competitor. In addition to competing through adjustments of tactical variables such as price or advertising intensity, we allow the incumbent to consider changes in its business model. We consider four alternative business models, two pure models (subs...

We present an technique for developing a single, aperiodic (or universal) tile that does not overlap. We provide two examples, constructed by converting overlapping regions of Gummelt's decagon cover to interleaved regions in a porous tile. Each is a bounded, dense, sponge-like set of points in 2 that tiles the plane aperiodically. One tile has mea...

This paper examines social networks' incentives to establish compatibility under fee and ad-sponsored business models. I analyze the competition between two social networks and show that compatibility is only possible when the two networks are ad-sponsored. I also find that even when both networks are ad-sponsored, a network with a significant inst...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

In the mid-1990s, productivity growth accelerated sharply in the U.S. economy. In this paper, we identify several other changes that have occurred during the same time and argue that they are consistent with an increased use of information technology (IT) in general and enterprise IT in particular. Case studies and econometric evidence demonstrate...

Researchers debate the role of installed base, platform quality and consumer expectations in driving the success of platforms. We analyze a dynamic model in which a new entrant with superior quality competes with an incumbent platform, and examine the long-run market outcomes. We find that the driver of market dynamics depends critically on the str...

The literature of private provision of public goods suggests that incentive to contribute is inversely related to group size. This paper empirically tests this relationship using field data from Chinese Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. We exploit an exogenous reduction in group size as a result of the blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China and e...

Abstract Providing network infrastructure for authenti-cation, authorization and accounting (AAA) functionalities required by inter-enterprise business applications operat-ing over the global Internet is a challenging problem. The infrastructure needs to support large numbers of clients and services, and also to provide secure resources sharing bet...

One of the most remarkable discoveries in the theory of tilings concerns the existence of sets of prototiles which admit infinitely many tilings of the plane without any of these tilings being periodic. Sets of prototiles with this property are called aperiodic. In 1966, R. Berger discovered a set of 20426 prototiles with corresponding matching rul...