管理科学与工程系学术讲座

题目：关于平台治理问题的若干思考：亚马逊、特斯拉和火狐

主讲人：张诚(复旦大学管理学院教授)

时间：2018年5月15日 下午1：30- 3:30

地点: 同济大厦A楼308教室 

报告内容摘要

Study1：Online platforms face a dilemma in deciding whether to open their product review systems to all potential contributors such as those unverified purchasers. By analyzing data from Amazon, we discover that, surprisingly, the reviews without a verified purchase, the non-verified reviews (NVRs), were perceived as more helpful than the verified reviews (VRs). As such, they were found to have a greater impact on the actual product sales. We find that this result is related to Amazon’s disclosure policy about review sources that has occurred since 2009. The disclosure policy assigned a verification tag to the VRs, but not to the NVRs. Based on a differences-in-differences analysis using data before and after the disclosure policy, we find that the introduction of the verification tag has led the top reviewers (but not the non-top reviewers) to exert more efforts to write longer reviews. Our results suggest that platform openness can result in more valuable information when the platform users are motivated by certain mechanisms (e.g., the disclosure of a review source, a powerful contributor reputation system). 

Study2：Electric vehicles (EVs) have been proposed as a major technology to achieve substantial reduction in fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emission. Given the fact that EVs are new products with significant physical limitation in driving range, battery charging stations play a significant indirect network effect in promotion the EVs diffusion. As charging stations spatially located in regions are serving both nearby and remote EV users, they take a dual role in influencing EVs’ diffusion within a region and across regions. Despite fruitful literature in new product diffusion, there exist a significant gap to address such indirect network effect in new product diffusion. First, existing studies tend to limit their analysis to demand factors in the indirect network effect while overlook the supply planning factors, thus reducing the ability to broaden the insights from market and operation management interface. Second, yet although previous studies have found that user heterogeneity in need affect new product diffusion, few empirical observations exist to distinguish the impact of indirect network effect on the user heterogeneity. In this paper, we address the two major gaps in the literature by using a panel data containing 38-month 49-state Tesla’s vehicle registration and charging stations information in the United States, starting from when the first Tesla model was registered in year 2012 till three years later when Tesla becomes well adopted. The study investigates the spatial indirect network effects (INE) of states’ battery charging stations on the focal and neighborhood states’ EV diffusion respectively. By distinguishing INE along such spatial dimension, the study further reveals how supply planning for users’ heterogeneous driving requirements, i.e. satisfying EV users for local service convenience and long-distance travel accessibility respectively, affect EV diffusion. The results reveal the spatial patterns of indirect network effect in several ways. First, the charging-to-vehicle effect is positive and even five times more than the vehicle-to-charging effect within the focal state, indicating the significant role that rich spatial location of charging stations plays on focal states’ EV diffusion. Second, charging-to-vehicle effect is also positively significant cross state effect. Interestingly, such effect is only found by Tesla’s destination charging stations (DC), but not on its supercharger stations (SC). These findings provide us with an important basis to discuss theoretical and policy implications of spatial patterns of indirect network effect in new product diffusion.

Study3：Application programming interfaces (APIs) are the foundation of digital platform ecosystems. Based on APIs, platforms can explore growth opportunities to expand the scope of platform’s ecosystem at an unprecedented scale. Although APIs can facilitate the app development, there is also a dilemma between innovation and imitation, suggested by the resource deployment perspective and the modularity perspective. Motivated by the tension, we examine how platform APIs may influence innovation behavior and imitation behavior in third-party app development, and how these influences may be dependent on the app market environment. We empirically test our theoretical ideas using data about a leading web browser platform, and applying analytics techniques on app source code to identify original apps and copycat apps. Based on the difference-in-differences identification strategy, our finding suggests that the provision of platform APIs fosters app innovation and dampens app imitation. The fostering effect of platform APIs on app innovation is strengthened in app markets with greater demand potential and higher market-level app complexity. The dampening effect of platform APIs on app imitation is weakened in app markets with greater demand potentials and higher market concentration. Our study generates important theoretical and practical implications. 

报告人简介

张诚，复旦大学管理学院教授，新加坡国立大学信息系统博士。主要关注信息技术的商业价值和社会价值研究，注重结合企业运营实际和数据发展理论和实证。近5 年在国际期刊（包括MIS Quarterly, Journal on Computing, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology，Decision Support Systems，Information & Management，European Journal of Information Systems，PLOS One等）上发表科研论文18 篇。

张诚担任/担任过国际期刊JAIS (2012-2014), JGIM (2008-), and IEEE TPC (2011-)编委，以及ICIS和PACIS的分会主持、副编辑等工作，为超过20 本国际期刊审稿上百篇。此外张诚获得教育部高等学校科学研究优秀成果奖二等奖(2009)，国际信息资源管理年会IRM 最佳论文奖(2011), INFORMS 信息系统与技术年会CIST 最佳论文奖(2013), 以及国家级教学成果二等奖(2014)。