Alibaba’s Taobao platform launched a unique Taobao Town Certification (TTC) program in 2014 to recognize all sellers in a rural town collectively when their total sales volume exceeded a certain threshold. Unlike other platform certifications that often promote popular products or top-rated sellers individually, TTC is a unique “collective” strategy that endorses all sellers in a specific town “collectively.” In this paper, we examine the causal effects of this collective promotion program on sellers’ business performance and other social issues such as regional economic disparities and inclusive economic development.
In this research, we collaborated with Asia’s largest microblogging platform to explore strategies that can effectively stimulate user engagement. Drawing upon the media system dependency theory and social comparison theory, we designed and implemented a large-scale field experiment on the platform, in which we introduced a gamified voting system into the Communities, enabling users to advocate for their idols and compete on a public leaderboard.
Despite the booming of platform businesses, disintermediation has become a severe issue facing many platforms. In this research, we design and analyze an undercover randomized field experiment to investigate how sellers respond to disintermediation requests initiated by buyers.
Previous studies have shown that dispatch systems, which use innovative technology to match riders with taxis, can substantially reduce search frictions and are therefore more efficient than conventional street hails. However, how to design dispatch systems has not been fully investigated in the literature. In this research, we developed and estimated a structural model for the two-sided ride-hailing market to compare the advantages and disadvantages of a bidding-based dispatch system and an allocation-based dispatch system. (with Junhong Chu and Xueli Zhang)
This study takes advantage of an exogenous policy change in which a leading taxi company in Singapore introduced an origin-destination-based flat-fare option to causally evaluate the causal effects of flat-rate pricing the ride-hailing market.
This research examines sellers’ fraudulent behavior in the taxi industry. Specifically, we identify whom taxi drivers tend to overtreat, what types of drivers are likely to overtreat, and when they tend to escalate overtreatment. (with Junhong Chu)