Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: My thesis work focuses on modeling consumers' decision making under various online contexts with social externalities, and studying the optimal policies and strategies for firms in response. Recent innovations in digital economies bring both opportunity and challenges to practitioners. Firms try to leverage innovations, such as online group buying and social media, to improve their profitability. However, without a clear understanding of how the consumers participate in the process, firms are not able to utilize these innovations to their full potential. My research delves into individuals' decision making under various online contexts, investigating how consumers interact under novel sales mechanisms and how this interaction impacts on firms' profitability. Using the proposed demand models, I then study operational and marketing policies and strategies that can improve the management of various sales processes by firms.In particular, my thesis consists of two projects, namely online group buying and social-influence moderated demand process. I study the group-buying project from two perspectives. First, in Chapter 2, I investigate the information management strategy for group-buying mechanisms from an analytical perspective. Second, I study the effect of thresholds on consumers' sign-up behavior from an empirical perspective in Chapter 3. The empirical study is made possible by a real-time dataset extracted from online group-buying firms, such as Groupon and LivingSocial, using a data crawler built on a major cloud platform. Chapter 4 summarizes the results of the second project, where I study how social-influence moderated demand process, often facilitated by internal and external social media, affects the profitability of a newsvendor-type firm.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Jiahua Wu
Language: English
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2762262637