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.
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.
Leveraging a unique quasi-experiment in which a leading Chinese ride-sharing company introduced surge pricing in different cities in waves, this research combines the difference-in-differences estimator with the causal forest algorithm to identify the causal effects of surge pricing on driver behavior in the ride-sharing market.