Liangfei Qiu

University of Florida | UF · Department of Information Systems and Operations Management

This paper investigates the ramifications of information feed integration on user engagements and contributions in online content-sharing platforms by exploiting a natural experiment occurred in a leading knowledge-sharing platform that integrated informal social posts with professional knowledge content in one feed. Our results show that the juxta...

Purpose Users' knowledge contribution behaviors are critical for online Q&A communities to thrive. Well-organized question threads in online Q&A communities enable users to clearly read existing answers and their evaluations before contributing. Based on the social comparison and peer influence literature, the authors examine peer influence on the...

Recognizing the importance of doctor engagement in online health communities (OHCs), managers and platform owners seek to foster doctor-patient interactions and encourage doctors’ knowledge sharing by introducing informal payments. This study investigates how informal payments in the form of monetary gifts affect doctor engagement, using the launch...

Recognizing the importance of doctor engagement in online health communities (OHCs), managers and platform owners seek to foster doctor-patient interactions and encourage doctors’ knowledge sharing by introducing informal payments. This study investigates how informal payments in the form of monetary gifts affect doctor engagement, using the launch...

Online arbitrage, a recent trend on e‐commerce platforms, occurs when a firm (the “arbitrage firm”) copies the product description of another firm (the “designer firm,” who is the original seller of the product) and sells the product at a marked‐up price on a different platform from the designer firm. Once receiving a consumer's order, the arbitrag...

The medical insurance payment system (MIPS) is a key mechanism to ensure the public's access to medical services. In a game‐theoretic model, we examine the impact of two MIPSs, fee‐for‐service (FFS) and diagnosis‐related groups (DRG), on patient choices, provider behavior, and out‐of‐pocket rate. We find that neither FFS nor DRG can dominate the ot...

Although brands have widely adopted multiple marketing media, our understanding of how to effectively coordinate traditional advertising and social media marketing to improve business outcomes is still limited. This paper examines the role of product fit uncertainty in determining how the two media and their interaction affect product sales differe...

The rise of social media platforms has created new opportunities for successful customer relationship management (CRM) activities. Compared with traditional CRM, social media–based CRM enables brands to easily and directly communicate with their customers, which can strengthen customer relationships. The public nature of social media offers an inno...

Online healthcare portals have become prevalent worldwide in recent years. One common form of healthcare portal is the online consultation website, which provides a bridge between patients and doctors and reduces patients’ time and cost when seeking healthcare services. Another form is the healthcare service appointment website, which facilitates o...

Care coordination involves shaping patient care activities and sharing information among all participants concerned with a patient's care to achieve safe and effective care. The objectives of care coordination are to promote sharing of patients’ clinical information, keep patients and families informed, and manage effective referrals and care trans...

With the growth of online mental healthcare platforms, health professionals have been providing online consultation services during their spare time. However, little is known about the prosocial behaviors of health professionals on these platforms and their effect on professionals’ economic performance. In this research, we aim to identify and quan...

An increasing number of companies are using corporate online communities, a new information technology tool, to facilitate internal knowledge sharing. The corporate online community also offers companies a novel source to understand employee's behaviors such as voluntary turnover, an important part of workforce management. Little is known, however,...

As one of the most important financial innovations in the last two decades, credit default swap (CDS) contracts have been initiated and actively traded in the market to hedge against credit risks. However, little is known about how these financial innovations affect an underlying firm's operations. In this empirical study, we find that an underlyin...

Reduction in hospital readmissions has long been identified as a target area for healthcare public policy reform by the U.S. government. In October 2012, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) established the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) program, which requires the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to reduce payments to hosp...

Firms and organizations are increasingly using real-time performance feedback mechanisms to evaluate employees, where any employee (rather than just the supervisor) can rate other employees. Hence, a need arises to better understand how network positions of employees in such a system impact their performance. Analyzing nearly 4,000 feedback instanc...

Firms of all sizes are “joining the conversation” on social media platforms and increasingly trademarking hashtags related to their products and brands. This added effort to protect intellectual property and its impact on social media engagement have not been investigated in the literature. In this study, we find that trademarking hashtags plays a...

The prominence of real-time ridesharing services, such as Uber and Lyft, has dramatically changed the landscape of traditional industries. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the short-term wage elasticity of labor supply in real-time ridesharing markets using data from a major ridesharing platform in China. By exploiting an exogenous s...

On e-commerce platforms, consumers rely heavily on online reviews, sales volume, and social media discussions to infer product quality. As a result, the past decade has witnessed an explosive growth of seller-initiated misrepresentation of quality through fake reviews, fake sales, and fake posts. We develop an analytical model to investigate seller...

With the development of data-intensive internet services, the world has witnessed explosive growth in mobile data consumption during the last couple of years. The upcoming generation of 5G-capable phones and networks will continue and even accelerate that process. At the same time, consumers are becoming more conscious about their data consumption...

Are employees willing to voluntarily share knowledge with their higher-ups? The existing studies show that the answer is no—employees are less likely to share knowledge with their higher-ups in the offline setting, corporate wikis, and online discussion groups. We answer the same question in a corporate question-and-answer (Q&A) community and argue...

The new sharing economy model has introduced a dramatic, disruptive impact on the traditional industries by matching the demand and supply in real‐time. In this paper, we examine how the entry of Uber, a ride‐sharing services digital platform, brings new disruptive changes in public transportation operations. Significant debate has surrounded wheth...

Breast cancer remains the leading cause of cancer deaths among women around the world. Contemporary treatment for breast cancer is complex and involves highly specialized medical professionals collaborating in a series of information-intensive processes. This poses significant challenges to optimization of treatment plans for individual patients. W...

The sales effect of product reviews has been a contentious issue with competing perspectives about when product reviews serve as a benefit, a burden, or a trifle. Unlike previous research that separately investigates the impact of each eWOM system, our study empirically examines the interaction effects of dual eWOM systems, i.e., product reviews an...

Informative contributions are critical for the healthy development of online Q&A communities, which have gained increasing popularity in solving personalized open-ended problems. However, little is known about whether past contribution behaviors and corresponding community feedbacks received affect the characteristics of subsequent contributions. D...

The digital technology underlying the concept of Industry 4.0 has brought new disruptive changes to the economy. As an innovative service model, the unique characteristics of the space‐sharing economy require the understanding of emotional and psychological aspects in managing such a disruptive service model. We empirically examine the impact of un...

We study the spillover effects of the online reviews of other covisited products on the purchases of a focal product using clickstream data from a large retailer. The proposed spillover effects are moderated by (a) whether the related (covisited) products are complementary or substitutive, (b) the choice of media channel (mobile or personal compute...

Innovation and competition are two major pillars in the IT industry. In this paper, we examine the causal relationship between product market competition and innovations in the IT industry. We measure the innovations from both the quantity (number of patents) and the quality (number of non-self citations) perspectives. Based on the Herfindahl-Hirsc...

The operations management literature has recently begun to analyze how novel data sources help practitioners better understand product demand. We extend this stream of research by analyzing how air quality, a prominent environmental factor that has received little attention in prior studies, can impact product demand. Specifically, we examine how a...

The unprecedented growth of social network users in the last decade has resulted in significant increases in the availability of individual-specific information such as holiday pictures, mobile check-ins at restaurants, and information on everyday purchases. Consumers shopping through social network channels are increasingly using this information...

In order to deliver real-time feedback to support employee development and rapid innovation, many companies are replacing formal review-based performance management with systems that enable frequent and continuous employee evaluation. Real-time feedback applications enable supervisors and employees to give, seek, and receive competency-based feedba...

We discuss the economic impacts of the interplay between vertical integration and zero-rating for digital content. To this end, we develop a game-theoretic model that involves an Internet Service Provider (ISP), two competing content providers (CPs)—one an ad-supported CP, the other ad-free—and consumers. While previous studies have separately exam...

Reputation systems have been an important component for improvement of online markets’ efficiency by reducing uncertainty about the quality of the sellers. Most, if not all, reputation systems examined in the extant literature reflect the sellers’ long-term accumulative reputation, which has several drawbacks that impede accomplishing the intended...

How will disclosing users’ identities affect their content-generation activities? Will this identity-disclosure policy in one section also change users’ behaviors in the other section? We answer these questions by using a natural experiment where a large corporate online community chose to disclose users’ identities in one section (the focal sectio...

Traditionally, consumers purchase physical music (often in the form of CDs or cassettes) from local retailers. With the development of Internet technology, the market share of digital music has grown rapidly in recent years. Unlike physical music, digital music is provided by several emerging digital music providers through the Internet to consumer...

Online reviews play a significant role in influencing decisions made by users in day-to-day life. The presence of reviewers who deliberately post fake reviews for financial or other gains, however, negatively impacts both users and businesses. Unfortunately, automatically detecting such reviewers is a challenging problem since fake reviews do not s...

Healthcare portals are gaining in popularity, connecting doctors with potential consumers of healthcare services. As online search and transaction marketplaces, they bring both sides of the market onto the same platform. Managers or platform owners seek to create value by increasing the number of users on either side of demand and supply of service...

The unprecedented growth of cellular traffic driven by the use of smartphones for web surfing, video streaming, and cloud-based services poses bandwidth challenges for cellular service providers. To manage the increasing data traffic, cellular service providers are experimenting with the use of third-party Wi-Fi hot spots to augment their cellular...

In this study, we estimate the effect of “online following,” a basic form of online social interaction, on members’ contributions in open source software (OSS) communities, using a unique longitudinal data set containing information on over 4 million OSS developers and their social interactions over 7 years. We find that obtaining new followers in...

In the past decade, we have witnessed the growing importance of management responses to online reviews on digital platforms. In this study, we examine the impact of online management responses on business performance and their spillover effect on nearby businesses. By adopting multiple causal identification strategies to address the issue of self-s...

Recently, mobile applications have offered users the option to share their location information with friends. Using data from a major location-based social networking application in China, we estimate an empirical model of restaurant discovery and observational learning. The unique feature of repeat customer visits in the data allows us to examine...

Opinion spammers exploit consumer trust by posting false or deceptive reviews that may have a negative impact on both consumers and businesses. These dishonest posts are difficult to detect because of complex interactions between several user characteristics, such as review velocity, volume, and variety. We propose a novel hierarchical supervised-l...

As the amount of online content explodes, consumers have to make a choice: either cut down their mobile data consumption or pay high overage fees. We investigate a recent phenomenon whereby network service providers are encouraging content providers to sponsor data for consumers. We analyze this phenomenon using game theory within a setting of one...

Online platforms are prone to abuse and manipulations from strategic parties. For example, social media and review websites suffer from sentiment manipulations, manifested in the form of opinion spam and fake reviews. The consequence of such manipulations is the deterioration of information quality as well as loss in consumer welfare. We study one...

The increasing pervasiveness of social networks allows users to share purchase behaviors with their online friends. In the present study, we examine optimal pricing strategies of a monopolistic firm using an analytical model that accounts for behavioral observational learning in social networks. We show that a seller could potentially control the i...

The performance of prediction markets depends crucially on the quality of user contribution. A social-media-based prediction market can utilize aspects of social effects to improve users’ contribution quality. In this study, we examine the causal effect of social audience size and online endorsement on prediction market participants’ prediction acc...

Recently, large companies have been experimenting with corporate prediction markets run among their employees. In the present study, we develop an analytical model to analyze the effects of information precision and social interactions on prediction market performance. We find that increased precision of public information is not always beneficial...

The growing importance of online social networks provides fertile ground for researchers seeking to gain a deeper understanding of fundamental constructs of human behavior, such as trust and forgiveness, and their linkage to social ties. Through a field experiment that uses data from the Facebook API to measure social ties that connect our subjects...

This article studies the strategic network formation in a location-based social network. We build an empirical model of social link creation that incorporates individual characteristics and pairwise user similarities. Specifically, we define four user proximity measures from biography, geography, mobility, and short messages. To construct proximity...

Internet service providers (ISPs) are experimenting with a business model that allows content providers (CPs) to subsidize Internet access for end consumers. In this study, we develop a game-theoretical model to analyze the effects of this sponsorship of consumer data usage. We find that the ISP's optimal network management choice of data sponsorsh...

One emerging business model for Internet service providers (ISPs) is to allow content providers (CPs) to subsidize Internet access for end consumers. In the present study, we develop a game-theoretical model to analyze the effects of this sponsorship of consumer data usage. The findings indicate that for an ISP, its optimal network management choic...

The development of Internet brought in revolutions in pricing models in the digital music industry. Currently, there are three common schemes to sell digital music: ownership, subscription and mixed pricing models. Our paper aims to explore and compare the three pricing models. Through a stylized model, we find that the advertisement revenue rate i...

Internet service providers (ISPs) are experimenting with a business model that allows content providers (CPs) to subsidize Internet access for end consumers. In this study, we develop a game-theoretical model to analyze the effects of this sponsorship of consumer data usage. We find that the ISP’s optimal network management choice of data sponsorsh...

Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented explosion in information technology that enables dynamic diffusion of user-generated content in social networks. Online videos, in particular, have changed the landscape of marketing and entertainment, competing with premium content and spurring business innovations. In the present study, we examine how...

Online platforms are prone to abuse and manipulations from strategic parties. For example, social media and review websites suffer from sentiment manipulations, manifested in the form of opinion spam and fake reviews. The consequence of such manipulations is the deterioration of information quality as well as loss in consumer welfare. Applying the...

The surge of social networking and video streaming on the go has led to the explosion of mobile data traffic. To minimize congestion costs for under-served demand (e.g., Dissatisfied customers, or churn), the cellular service provider is willing to pay WiFi hotspots to serve the demand that exceeds capacity. In the present study, we propose an opti...

This paper examines the effects of social network structures on prediction market accuracy in the presence of insider information through a randomized laboratory experiment. In the experiment, insider information is operationalized as signals on the state of nature with high precision. Motivated by the literature on insider information in the conte...

This paper examines the effect of a social network on prediction markets using a controlled laboratory experiment that allows us to identify causal relationships between a social network and the performance of an individual participant, as well as the performance of the prediction market as a whole. Through a randomized experiment, we first confirm...

Online platforms are prone to abuse and manipulation from strategic parties. For example, social media and review websites suffer from the presence of opinion spam and fake reviews. Applying the economic concept of rational expectation equilibrium (REE), we explore the impact of manipulation on consumer welfare in a Twitter-like environment. We arg...

The growing importance of online social networks makes it interesting to ask whether extant social capital can substitute for trust built through repeated interactions. It also provides fertile ground for researchers seeking to gain a deeper understanding of fundamental constructs of human behavior, such as trust, forgiveness, and their linkage to...

Information aggregation mechanisms are designed explicitly for collecting and aggregating dispersed information. An excellent example of the use of this “wisdom of crowds” is a prediction market. The purpose of our social network-embedded prediction market is to suggest that carefully designed market mechanisms can elicit and gather dispersed infor...

The unprecedented growth of cellular traffic driven by web surfing, video streaming, and cloud-based services is creating challenges for cellular service providers to fulfill the unmet demand. To minimize congestion costs for under-served demand (e.g., dissatisfied customers, or churn), the service provider is willing to pay WiFi hotspots to serve...

This paper examines the effect of a social network on prediction markets using a controlled laboratory experiment that allows us to identify causal relationships between a social network and the performance of an individual participant, as well as the performance of the prediction market as a whole. Through a randomized experiment, we first confirm...

This paper examines social learning and network effects that are particularly important for online videos, considering the limited marketing campaigns of user-generated content. Rather than combining both social learning and network effects under the umbrella of social contagion or peer influence, we develop a theoretical model and empirically iden...

This paper studies social learning and optimal pricing in the presence of location-based social networks, such as Foursquare. We provide an analytic model to resolve the following questions: (1) What is the optimal pricing strategy in location-based networks? (2) How do different pricing strategies affect social welfare and the privacy concern of c...

This paper studies the effects of information exchange and social networks on the performance of prediction markets with endogenous information acquisition. We provide a game-theoretic framework to resolve the question: Can social networks and information exchange promote the forecast efficiency in prediction markets? Our study shows that a social...

This paper develops a framework for the analysis of information acquisition and exchange in social networks. In the static model, there is a symmetric Bayes-Nash Equilibrium where all players use a simple cut-off strategy involving the threshold degree. The inefficiency of information acquisition is caused by free-riding. In the dynamics of informa...

Information aggregation mechanisms are designed explicitly for collecting and aggregating dispersed information. An excellent example of the use of this "wisdom of crowds" is a prediction market. The purpose of our Twitter-based prediction market is to suggest that carefully designed market mechanisms can elicit and gather dispersed information tha...