Office of the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

Message Archive

Monday, September 24, 2018

 

This email is being sent to all members of the Baruch College faculty.

For an archive of announcements sent from the Associate Provost beginning June 2011, click here.

                                                                                                

The Information Systems and Statistics Research Seminar Series

presents

Professor Ramesh Shankar, University of Connecticut

Reputational Loss Aversion: Empirical Evidence from StackOverflow.com

 Thursday,  September 27, 12:30 to 1:45 pm, NVC 11-217 (IS-STA Conference room)

 

 

From:  Prof. Qiang (David) Gao

Paul H. Chook Department of Information Systems and Statistics

Abstract:

Do people care equally about reputational gains and losses? We study this question by analyzing users’ contribution to online knowledge repositories, with data from StackOverflow.com, a website for user-curated technical questions and answers. Using a comprehensive dataset covering one-third of all activity on the website, we find that users who receive upvotes are encouraged to post more answers. But more interestingly, when users receive downvotes to their answers, they are much more strongly encouraged to post more answers. Reputational losses (downvotes) elicit a stronger reaction in users than reputational gains (upvotes), despite the risk of further reputational losses, suggesting the presence of reputational loss aversion. Loss aversion is higher among users in the higher reputation segment. These results hold after controlling for a variety of other factors, across different segments of contributors in different reputation-buckets. Our paper is novel in studying ex post reputational loss aversion using observational data, compared to prior studies on ex ante loss aversion in choice settings using primarily experimental approaches.

Biography:

Ramesh Shankar is Associate Professor of Information Systems at the School of Business, University of Connecticut. His current research focuses on Big Data analytics, social media, strategic analysis of digital goods such as software, music and video games, and the impact of information systems on business processes and the structure of firms. His research has appeared in leading journals such as Information Systems Research, Marketing Science, and ACM Transactions. He serves as Associate Editor for MISQ and ICIS. He has served as a management consultant with multinational corporations such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Morgan Stanley, Wipro Infotech, and ICICI Ltd, providing strategy formulation and implementation, economic analysis of contracts, financial business process re-engineering, systems design and implementation to industries such as financial services, electric utilities, oil and gas, consumer electronics, and enterprise software.

Presented by the Paul H. Chook Department of Information Systems and Statistics            

 To RSVP for any of the above events, please visit: http://tiny.cc/8e45xy. If you have any questions, please contact Qiang Gao at Qiang.Gao@baruch.cuny.edu.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Prof. John Horton Assistant Professor of IOM Leonard N. Stern School of Business New York University

Date: October 15, 2018 Time: 12:30 to 1:45PM Location: 11-217 IS-STA Conference room

Title: “Skin-in-the-Game” and Platform Credibility: Evidence from Field Experiments

 Abstract:

A platform marketplace guaranteed certain sellers for a randomly selected pool of would-be buyers. Offering a guarantee did not increase sales overall, but it did cause buyers to preferentially contract with guaranteed sellers, at the expense of those not guaranteed. However, other evidence from the experiment suggests buyers shifted to guaranteed sellers not because they offered lower financial risk, but rather because buyers viewed the platform’s decision to guarantee as informative about relative seller quality. Indeed, a follow-up experiment showed that simply “recommending” select sellers, with no offer of a guarantee, was equally effective at shifting buyers towards those selected sellers.

Biography:

John Horton is an Assistant Professor in the Information Systems Group at New York University’s Stern School of Business.  His research is primarily focused on issues in information systems, market design, labor economics and organizational economics, particularly in the context of online markets. His research has appeared in leading journals such as Information Systems Research, Management Science, Journal of Labor Economics, etc. 

Presented by the Paul H. Chook Department of Information Systems and Statistics            

 To RSVP for any of the above events, please visit: http://tiny.cc/3h55xy. If you have any questions, please contact Qiang Gao at Qiang.Gao@baruch.cuny.edu.

 

Qiang (David) Gao

Assistant Professor

Paul H. Chook Department of Information Systems and Statistics
Baruch College, The City University of New York
Phone: (646) 312 3192