Digital Platform: Design and Strategy

Today’s consumers heavily rely on online peer reviews to guide their purchase decisions. Yet, review platforms and businesses alike are struggling with a shortage of online reviews and declining review length. In response, many businesses have turned to offering incentives, such as discounts or even direct payments, in exchange for (often positive) reviews ... 阅读更多

When making online purchases, consumers often encounter a lengthy list of products whose quality they know little or nothing about, ranked by an unknown algorithm. Users often turn to others’ online reviews to estimate product quality—a process known as social learning. HKUST’s Dongwook Shin and colleagues shed light on the challenges that platforms face ... 阅读更多

Online platforms attract hundreds of millions of users, who post regularly on many topics. However, the algorithms used to direct them to content have faced criticism. HKUST’s Jia Liu and a colleague examine the phenomenon of “popularity bias” in recommender systems, taking advantage of a quasi-experiment conducted by China’s biggest online knowledge-sharing ... 阅读更多

Online product review platforms have become popular places for consumers to share their opinions on and experiences of the products and services they buy. In online marketplaces, the quality of a new product or service is initially unknown, but reviews posted by buyers inform subsequent customers. By reducing uncertainty about product quality, this type of ... 阅读更多

Social media platforms are investing millions in fighting “fake news,” but little is known about how effective their strategies are, say HKUST’s LEE Dong Won and colleagues. Offering much-needed guidance in today’s era of disinformation, the authors shed new light on the propagation of false and misleading news, identifying how it spreads and, critically ... 阅读更多

Twitter has almost 200 million users. Facebook’s customer base is even bigger, approaching 3 billion. Yet despite the staggering popularity of social media applications, it remains unclear exactly why and how people use this technology. Taking a holistic view of social media use, HKUST’s Professor Yan Xu and co-researchers developed a pioneering theory-based ... 阅读更多