Jie Zhang

The University of Texas at Arlington | UTA · Department of Information Systems and Operations Management

A surge in technological advancements and innovations has spurred the rise of on‐demand meal delivery platforms. Despite their widespread appeal, these platforms face two critical challenges (i.e., order batching and demand allocation) in effectively managing the delivery process while maintaining reliability. In response, this study aims to addres...

Mobile applications implemented with location-based and augmented reality (LBAR) technologies have become a new trend. They alter the app usage patterns, expand their mobility areas, and shape their daily lives. Consequently, local businesses may experience spillover effects in terms of store visits and online reputation. Anecdotal evidence is mixe...

Online innovation tournaments, such as those hosted by crowdsourcing platforms (e.g., Kaggle), have been widely adopted by firms to evolve creative solutions to various problems. Solvers compete in these tournaments to earn rewards. In such competitive environments, it is imperative that solvers provide creative solutions with minimum effort. This...

Online product reviews help consumers infer product quality, and the mean (average) rating is often used as a proxy for product quality. However, two self-selection biases, acquisition bias (mostly consumers with a favorable predisposition acquire a product and hence write a product review) and underreporting bias (consumers with extreme, either po...

Social media-based expert blogs are a crucial and credible online information source for consumers, yet little is known about the role of expert blogs for general consumer brand perceptions that bestow long-term value for the firm. On the basis of a novel dataset with 7,871 brand-day observations of over 131,000 expert blogs on major brands in the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to mine competitive intelligence in social media to find the market insight by comparing consumer opinions and sales performance of a business and one of its competitors by analyzing the public social media data. Design/methodology/approach – An exploratory test using a multiple case study approach was used t...

Advances in information technology bring changes to the nature of work by facilitating companies to go beyond the wisdom of their workforce and tap into the "wisdom of the crowd" via online crowdsourcing contests. In these contests, active and motivated individuals collaborate in the form of self-organized teams that compete for rewards. Using a ri...

Social media technologies have made it feasible for organizations to tap 'wisdom of the crowd' beyond their own workforce. Many organizations use online crowd sourcing contests to find solutions for their business problems. In these contests, self-organized virtual teams compete for monetary reward. Motivated by this phenomenon, this research inves...

The fast growth of e-commerce and online activities places increasing needs for authentication and secure communication to enable information exchange and online transactions. The public key infrastructure (PKI) provides a promising foundation for meeting such demand, in which certificate authorities (CAs) provide digital certificates. In practice,...

In the paper at hand we analyze the capacity planning problem of a service vendor providing a business process characterized by volatile demand to his customers. Thereby, we consider the situation that the service vendor executes certain activities by ...

Expert blogs have become an important source from which consumers obtain information about products and brands. Consumers heed information from such blogs because they are provided by fellow consumers who are regarded as experts and yet are not restrained to speak for a particular company. Thus, expert blogs are considered more credible, and it is...

Recent advances in information technology have made it feasible for organizations to pool expertise around the globe. In particular, organizations increasingly seek solutions to their business problems using online crowdsourcing contests that are open the public. Motivated by this new phenomenon, this research investigates how the distribution of s...

In online auctions, user-generated feedback reviews provide first-hand information on the trustworthiness of transaction partners to the community. To examine how the feedback reviews are taken into account of the buyers' bidding decisions and thus affect the final winning price of an auction, we thoroughly examine how buyers mentally interpret the...

Consumer buzz in the form of user-generated reviews, recommendations and blogs signals consumer attitude and advocacy can influence firm value. Web traffic also affects brand awareness and customer acquisition, and is a predictor of the performance of a firm’s stock in the market. The information systems (IS) and accounting literature have treated...

How and to what extent social media can generate desired benefits for firms has been of great interest to both researchers and practitioners. Extant literature has offered mixed perspectives comprising both optimism and skepticism. Furthermore, research has only begun to examine how social media can bring forth sustainable value for firms beyond sa...

Companies have increasingly advocated social media technologies to transform businesses and improve organizational performance. This study scrutinizes the predictive relationships between social media and firm equity value, the relative effects of social media metrics compared with conventional online behavioral metrics, and the dynamics of these r...

Cognitive effort and knowledge sharing play a critical role in the successful completion of knowledge intensive collaborative tasks. Such tasks require extensive coordination and sense making to facilitate joint problem solving and the creation of shared mental models. Furthermore, multiple heads often come with multiple stakes and perspectives, wh...

Why do two competitors form an alliance yet still compete with each other in the marketplace? Consider Yahoo's recent alliance with Microsoft to use its Bing search engine, yet both companies will compete with each other to sell search ads. In this paper we study dynamic alliance formation among competing firms with a multi-period model. In each pe...

We consider the production/inventory problem of a manufacturer (or a retailer) under non-stationary and stochastic supply availability. Although supply availability is uncertain, the supplier would be able to predict her near future shortages - and hence ...

Online price comparison agents (shopbots) allow consumers to instantaneously receive price and other information from many online retailers. Contrary to conventional wisdom, our empirical study of the book and computer hardware categories reveals that consumers are visiting more online retailer web sites after using shopbots. This finding suggests...

We develop an analytical model and conduct subsequent empirical analyses using data collected from the online retailers of digital cameras and video games. We find that (1) Internet retailers' base prices are positively associated with shipping quality but shipping charges are negatively associated with shipping quality; (2) Internet retailers will...

We discuss the optimal way for a software vendor to license software: a perpetual license at a posted price, a subscription contract that subscribers receive automatic updates for periodic payment, or a hybrid approach that involves both. By addressing specific issues in the software market such as network effects, quality uncertainty, upgrade comp...

We examine the optimal way for a software vendor to license software: perpetual license at a posted price, subscription contract that subscribers receive automatic updates for periodic payment, or a hybrid approach that involves both. By addressing such specific issues in the software market as network effects, quality uncertainty, upgrade compatib...

Introduction While product review systems that collect and disseminate opinions about products from recent buyers (Table 1) are valuable forms of word-of-mouth communication, evidence suggests that they are overwhelmingly positive. Kadet notes that most products receive almost five stars. Chevalier and Mayzlin also show that book reviews on Amazon...

Software vendors have been using the subscription (leasing) model to replace or supplement the traditional perpetual licensing (selling) model. Durable goods theories generally support such a model. This paper looks at a software vendor who can sell (at a posted price) or lease his product and guarantee that subscribers will always have the latest...

The "Software-as-a-Service" (SaaS) model, which delivers software over the Internet on a subscription basis, has been growing rapidly. Software vendors use this leasing model to replace or supplement the traditional perpetual licensing (selling) model. This paper looks at a software vendor who can sell (at a posted price) or lease his product, wher...

Online product reviews provided by consumers who previously purchased products have become a major information source for consumers and marketers regarding product quality. This study extends previous research by conducting a more compelling test of the effect of online reviews on sales. In particular, we consider both quantitative and qualitative...

Web site usability is concerned with how easy and intuitive it is for individuals to learn to use and interact with a Web site. It is a measure of the quality of a Web site’s presence, as perceived by users. The usability of Web sites is important, because high usability is associated with a positive attitude toward the Web site and results in high...

For many organizations the corporate website has emerged as the primary vehicle for inter-organizational and intra- organizational information exchange, as well as for sales and promotion activities. The performance of websites in terms of the extent to which they can attract and retain traffic, strongly influences the volume of business transacted...

Online word-of-mouth communication in the form of product reviews is a major information source for consumers and marketers about product quality. The literature has used the mean of online reviews to predict product sales, assuming that the mean reflects product quality. However, using a combination of econometric, experimental, and analytical res...

The continuous growth of e-commerce makes it critical for firms to understand consumers' search behavior so that e-commerce Web sites and the underlying information systems can be designed to better cater to consumers' needs. This paper extends the classic search model to analyze online consumer search behavior. The analytical results suggest how c...

Online word-of-mouth (WOM) communication in the form of online product reviews, such as those provided by consumers who have previously purchased a product, has become a major information source for consumers and marketers about a product's quality. The literature has thus far used online product reviews to predict a product's sales and future succ...

Web site usability is concerned with how easy and intuitive it is for individuals to presence, as perceived by users. The usability of Web sites is important because high usability is associated with a positive attitude and greater trust towards the Web site. Poorly designed Web sites with low usability lead to negative financial impacts. Existing...

The uncertainty about product quality and the traders' credibility may impede the liquidity and efficiency of online auctions. In contrast to the literature on online feedback mechanisms that evaluate sellers' reputation without distinguishing their roles in the transactions, we claim that “not all reputation is created equal” — bidders in online a...

As a digital version of word-of-mouth, online review has become a major information source for consumers and has very important implications for a wide range of management activities. While some researchers focus their studies on the impact of online product review on sales, an important assumption remains unexamined, that is, can online product re...

"We examine a model in which an upstream firm can sell directly online and through heterogeneous intermediaries to heterogeneous consumers engaging in time-consuming search. Direct online sales may be more or less convenient and involve costly returns if the good fits consumers poorly. Direct selling appeals to higher-value consumers and increases...

Online word-of-mouth (WOM) communication in the form of online product reviews, such as those provided by consumers that have previously purchased a product, has become a major information source for consumers and marketers about a product’s quality. The literature has thus used online product reviews to predict a product’s sales and future success...

Web site usability is concerned with how easy and intuitive it is for individuals to presence, as perceived by users. The usability of Web sites is important because high usability is associated with a positive attitude and greater trust towards the Web site. Poorly designed Web sites with low usability lead to negative financial impacts. Existing...

For organizations engaged in electronic business, the corporate website has emerged as the single most important interface through which transactions are carried out. This being so, appropriate design characteristics are required to make websites effective. Customers expect websites to be designed differently, depending on the task and purpose asso...

Web site usability is concerned with how easy and intuitive it is for individuals to learn to use and interact with a Web site. It is a measure of the quality of a Web site's presence, as perceived by users. The usability of Web sites is important, because high usability is associated with a positive attitude toward the Web site and results in high...

Although the Web has grown to several billion pages over the past few years, just a few of the Web sites get most of the visits. Such sites, called portals, attract visitors and advertisers and provide a lot of valuable content at no charge to the visitors. The portals attract a disproportionate amount of the Internet advertising dollars and have t...

A key decision by the manager of an advertisement-supported Web site is the balance between content and advertising. Content is costly but attracts viewers, whereas advertisement generates revenues but repels viewers. The period-by-period balancing decision is further complicated by the growth and diffusion nature of Web site viewership. This decis...

A new service model has emerged which delivers application software and services over the Web on a lease or subscription basis. Our paper studies the optimal licensing policy of a software vendor that uses that business model. We look at software vendors that are both selling (at a posted price) or leasing their products where as lessor they guaran...

A key decision by the manager of an advertisement-supported Web site is the balance between content and advertising. Content is costly but attracts viewers, whereas advertisement generates revenues but repels viewers. The period-by-period balancing decision is further complicated by the growth and diffusion. nature of Web site viewership This decis...

INEEC03Balancing the amount of advertising and content on a web page affects the profitability of the web site and its attractiveness to potential visitors. This tradeoff is modelled as a control problem for a web site manager who is maximizing the net present value of cash flows by controlling the amount of advertising and content displayed on the...

Balancing the amount of advertising and content affects the profitability of the web site and its attractiveness to potential visitors. This tradeoff is modeled as a control problem for a web site manager who is maximizing the net present value of cash flows by controlling the amount of advertising and content displayed on the web site over its lif...