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Gender Inequality in Research Productivity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

by Ruomeng Cui, Hao Ding, and Feng Zhu

Analysis of data from the largest open-access repositories for social science in the world finds that female researchers’ productivity significantly dropped relative to that of male researchers as a result of the lockdown in the United States.

Marketplace Scalability and Strategic Use of Platform Investment

by Jin Li, Gary P. Pisano, and Feng Zhu

One well-known feature of marketplace platforms like Airbnb and eBay is their scalability. This paper identifies the strategic trade-off and implications for scalability when a platform provides services to existing and potential sellers that help reduce their fixed costs of running the business. Timing this investment is an important consideration for maximizing marketplace scalability.

Trust and Disintermediation: Evidence from an Online Freelance Marketplace

by Grace Gu and Feng Zhu

Intermediaries such as brokers, distributors, and agents all face a risk of disintermediation, when two sides circumvent the intermediary and thus avoid the intermediary’s fees. This study of a large online freelance marketplace finds that enhanced user trust increases this risk, alongside other contributing factors like being geographically near one another, having easily divisible jobs, and clients themselves having high ratings.

Companies Love Big Data But Lack the Strategy To Use It Effectively

by Dina Gerdeman

Big data is a critical competitive advantage for companies that know how to use it. Harvard Business School faculty share insights that they teach to executives. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

First Look at New Research, February 28

Sean Silverthorne

How newspapers countered Craigslist ... Growth options for DO & CO ... Augmedix: a video transcription service for doctors.

Ideological Segregation among Online Collaborators: Evidence from Wikipedians

by Shane Greenstein, Yuan Gu, and Feng Zhu

This study analyzes the dynamics supporting or undermining segregated conversations. Among the findings: In spite of their great differences, contributors on Wikipedia tend to move toward less segregated conversations. Contributors’ positions become more neutral over time, not more extreme. In addition, the conflict resolution mechanisms and the mix of informal and formal norms at Wikipedia play an important role in encouraging a community that works toward a neutral point of view.

When Hosts Attack: The Competitive Threat of Online Platforms

by Carmen Nobel

Online retail platforms like Amazon are great for the third-party businesses that use them—until the platform’s owner decides to start competing with them. Feng Zhu looks at the factors that turn hosts into predators. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Why Fierce Competitors Apple and Amazon Became ’Frenemies’ Over eReaders

by Michael Blanding

New research by Feng Zhu and colleagues reveals why sometimes it's better for fierce competitors like Apple and Amazon to work together. Open for comment; 5 Comment(s) posted.

Frenemies in Platform Markets: The Case of Apple’s iPad vs. Amazon’s Kindle

by Ron Adner, Jianqing Chen & Feng Zhu

Frenemies are friends who are sometimes enemies. Among e-readers, Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle are frenemies in platform markets because they compete aggressively against each other yet cooperate to a certain extent. The model in this paper explains the incentives for two platforms to become frenemies when the difference in their foci for profits is sufficiently large. That competing platforms with different profit foci may have incentives to cooperate also applies in other settings such as the tablet market or e-commerce. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

Is Wikipedia More Biased Than Encyclopædia Britannica?

by Michael Blanding

By identifying politically biased language in Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia, Feng Zhu hopes to learn whether professional editors or open-sourced experts provide the most objective entries. Open for comment; 16 Comment(s) posted.

Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia

by Shane Greenstein & Feng Zhu

Britannica and Wikipedia are sources that aspire to provide comprehensive information. They both face similar challenges over the length, tone, and factual basis of controversial, unverifiable, and subjective content. Such challenges are pervasive in the production of encyclopedic knowledge about current events and political debates surrounding topics like taxation, health care policies, biographical details of presidential candidates, and the funding of stem-cell research, for example. In this paper the authors begin with a simple observation: Each source resolves these challenges differently in distinct production processes. Britannica, for example, produces its final content after consultation between editors and experts. Wikipedia, on the other hand, relies on the "crowd" for its content, receiving contributions from tens of millions of individual users. Examining 3,918 pairs of articles about US politics that appeared in both outlets, the authors compare bias and slant from the two production models. Results suggest that the allocation of editorial time and user contributions is central to the minimization of differences in bias and slant between the two outlets. Among the managerial implications, community managers can work towards a balanced view if intervention alleviates disputes and generates the right kind of participation. Key concepts include: The costs of producing, storing, and distributing knowledge shape different biases and slants in the collective intelligence (Wikipedia) and the expert-based model (Britannica). Many of the differences between Wikipedia and Britannica arise because Wikipedia faces insignificant storage, production, and distribution costs. This leads to longer articles with greater coverage of more points of view. The number of revisions of Wikipedia articles results in more neutral point of view. In the best cases, it reduces slant and bias to a negligible difference with an expert-based model. As the world moves from reliance on expert-based production of knowledge to collectively-produced intelligence, it is unwise to blindly trust the properties of knowledge produced by the crowd. Their slants and biases are not widely appreciated, nor are the properties of the production model as yet fully understood. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

A Scholarly Crowd Explores Crowdsourcing

by Sean Silverthorne

At the Open and User Innovation Workshop, several hundred researchers discussed their work on innovation contests, user-led product improvements, and the biases of crowds. Closed for comment; 1 Comment(s) posted.

Encouraging Niche Content in an Ad-Driven World

by Julia Hanna

Research by Feng Zhu and Monic Sun explores how advertising drives bloggers to shift their writing to subjects that will grab more eyeballs—namely, the stock market, celebrities, and salacious behavior. But surprise: Ads might also help generate more niche content. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

The Impact of Patent Wars on Firm Strategy: Evidence from the Global Smartphone Market

by Yongwook Paik & Feng Zhu

Patents and patent enforcement strategies have become an essential part of firms' competitive strategies: They are used as isolating mechanisms to protect intellectual property or as defense mechanisms to help obtain access to external innovations. Using data from the global smartphone market, the authors of this paper investigate the effect of escalated patent litigations—the so-called patent war—on firm strategy. The smartphone industry is a classic example of a business ecosystem, as participants in this industry are highly interconnected and this interconnectivity means that effects on some ecosystem participants are likely to extend to affect the rest. The authors' findings show that the efficacy of patent enforcement systems across markets plays a significant role in firm strategy during patent wars, and ultimately shapes the global competitive landscape. As the patent war intensifies, smartphone vendors, even those not directly involved in patent litigations, gradually shift their business foci to markets with weaker intellectual property (IP) rights protection. This shift, however, is attenuated for vendors with stronger technological capabilities and is more pronounced for vendors whose home markets have weak IP systems. Together, these changes shape the competitive landscape for platform competition. Key concepts include: This study enhances our understanding of patents, patent enforcement strategies, and the dynamics of patent wars in platform competition. Patent strategy and its enforcement are becoming increasingly important for value appropriation by innovators, similar to marketing and pricing. Firms use markets with strong IP protection as a natural battleground for their patent enforcement strategies, which leads to increased litigation risk for other participants in those markets. As the patent war intensifies, smartphone vendors focus their businesses more on markets with weak IP protection than on those with strong IP protection, even when they are not involved in patent litigation themselves. This effect is more pronounced for vendors with weak technological capabilities, and vendors that come from countries with weak IP systems. Consistent with the shift at the vendor level, Android market share grows faster in weak IP countries than in strong IP countries as the patent war intensifies. Interestingly, this result suggests that the patent war intended to hamper the proliferation of Android phones may have merely shifted the sales of Android phones to weak IP countries. Consequently, the Android system has flourished in weak IP countries. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.