Decision, Operations & Information Technologies
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2230
Prior to January 4, 2009, this unit was named Decision & Information Technologies.
Browse
3 results
Search Results
Item Evolution and Current Practices of Ride Services(2021) Noh, Daehoon; Tunca, Tunay I; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the past decade we have seen a rapid transformation in the ride service market with the advent of decentralized Ride Hailing (RH) services (e.g., Uber, Lyft), who gained significant market share at the expense of traditional Vertically Integrated (VI) taxi companies.However, it is not clear what the endgame of this competition between these two models will be. What is more, the current development of driverless car technology, which leads to another form of Vertically Integrated service model, is posing further questions on how the industry will shape in the future. In the first chapter, we analyze this question by game-theoretically modeling entry and competition between decentralized Ride Hailing and Vertically Integrated ride services. First, by comparing monopoly models, we find that due to the advantage of centralization, the VI model is more efficient in increasing firm profits, reducing delays and increasing social welfare compared to the RH model. However, in competition, the RH firm predominantly reverses this disadvantage, and gains the upper hand in the market with lower delays, higher market share, and higher profits due to its flexibility in setting its supply compared to the VI firm, which projects the success of the ride-hailing firms compared to the traditional taxi model. Furthermore, the entry of the RH firm into the market always improves social welfare, while the entry of an inefficient VI firm may reduce industry service levels and surprisingly decrease social despite introducing competition. Our results suggest that entry of a costly self-driving car technology may in fact hurt the industry as a whole and social welfare in a market that is served predominantly by a ride-hailing company, and this technology should be approached carefully by the industry and the regulators. In the second chapter, we examine the effect of offering ride distance information to the drivers in the ride-hailing two-sided market.This is of our interest because currently, the drivers cannot observe the riders' destination. However the leading companies in the ride-hailing business such as Uber and Lyft are experimenting the effect of offering this information to the drivers, but the effect is yet uncertain. It may introduce efficiency, or it may aggravate the cherry picking behavior which will be detrimental to the firm. We develop a game theoretical model of (i) a ride-hailing firm where the drivers do not observe the riders' ride distance (the unobservable case), and (ii) where they can observe (the observable case). We compare the two cases to determine when it would benefit the ride-hailing firm to offer this information to the drivers. We also compare consumer surplus and social welfare to see if the firm's decision may be in conflict with the social planner's. Our main finding is that when consumers are patient, the drivers' cherry picking behavior introduces efficiency to the operations of the observable case, making it optimal for the firm to offer observability to the drivers. However as consumers become impatient, this cherry picking behavior becomes burdensome for the observable case, and thus the firm's optimal decision is to not give observability. Furthermore, under certain parameter regions, the firm's decisions are in conflict with the social planner's objective, thus the government may need to devise a policy to maximize social welfare.Item Marriages Made in Silico: Essays on Social Norms, Technology Adoption, and Institutions in Online Matrimonial Matching Platforms(2020) Karmegam, Sabari Rajan; Gopal, Anandasivam; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Online matrimonial platforms have emerged as a way to take the highly institutionalized process of arranged marriages online while preserving the offline social, cultural, and gender norms. While there is a rich body of empirical work on online dating, the corresponding literature on online matrimonial platforms is sparse. My dissertation seeks to fill this gap. In my first essay, I look at mobile adoption's role in online matrimonial platforms' engagement and matching outcomes. The analysis shows that unlike the dating market where the market's transaction costs are eased by the ubiquity and personal nature of the mobile device for all users, here subgroups associated with strong endogamous preferences benefit with mobile adoption. My work extends the mobile ecosystem study to the societal context where institutional norms take precedence and influence mobile adoption outcomes. In my second essay, I study how the search frictions, social norms, and disempowerment that results from the gender skew in online matching platforms can be mitigated by using appropriate market design. I use a quasi-experimental methodology by relying on two interventions designed by the platform to reduce women's cognitive load. The interventions improved the overall well-being of women on platforms. My work here aims to increase awareness on the role platforms needs to play to improve women's well-being while ensuring that online platforms do not unravel. In my third essay, I look at whether the sanctity of institutional norms and traditional markers of status - involvement of multiple stakeholders through parental involvement and social norms related to endogamy and gender roles are retained in online matrimonial platforms. I find that "platformization" leads to institutional unbundling, with outcomes guided by more liberal ethos. This essay extends the platform literature on institutional contexts and shows that transition to online settings may not be seamless. My dissertation thus contributes to the literature on Information Systems by highlighting the need to consider the societal, cultural, and gender norms to further our understanding of the market design and technology adoption in highly institutionalized contexts.Item ENGINEERING DIGITAL SHARING PLATFORM TO CREATE SOCIAL CONTAGION: EVIDENCE FROM LARGE SCALE RANDOMIZED FIELD EXPERIMENTS(2016) Sun, Tianshu; Viswanathan, Siva; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Peer-to-peer information sharing has fundamentally changed customer decision-making process. Recent developments in information technologies have enabled digital sharing platforms to influence various granular aspects of the information sharing process. Despite the growing importance of digital information sharing, little research has examined the optimal design choices for a platform seeking to maximize returns from information sharing. My dissertation seeks to fill this gap. Specifically, I study novel interventions that can be implemented by the platform at different stages of the information sharing. In collaboration with a leading for-profit platform and a non-profit platform, I conduct three large-scale field experiments to causally identify the impact of these interventions on customers’ sharing behaviors as well as the sharing outcomes. The first essay examines whether and how a firm can enhance social contagion by simply varying the message shared by customers with their friends. Using a large randomized field experiment, I find that i) adding only information about the sender’s purchase status increases the likelihood of recipients’ purchase; ii) adding only information about referral reward increases recipients’ follow-up referrals; and iii) adding information about both the sender’s purchase as well as the referral rewards increases neither the likelihood of purchase nor follow-up referrals. I then discuss the underlying mechanisms. The second essay studies whether and how a firm can design unconditional incentive to engage customers who already reveal willingness to share. I conduct a field experiment to examine the impact of incentive design on sender’s purchase as well as further referral behavior. I find evidence that incentive structure has a significant, but interestingly opposing, impact on both outcomes. The results also provide insights about senders’ motives in sharing. The third essay examines whether and how a non-profit platform can use mobile messaging to leverage recipients’ social ties to encourage blood donation. I design a large field experiment to causally identify the impact of different types of information and incentives on donor’s self-donation and group donation behavior. My results show that non-profits can stimulate group effect and increase blood donation, but only with group reward. Such group reward works by motivating a different donor population. In summary, the findings from the three studies will offer valuable insights for platforms and social enterprises on how to engineer digital platforms to create social contagion. The rich data from randomized experiments and complementary sources (archive and survey) also allows me to test the underlying mechanism at work. In this way, my dissertation provides both managerial implication and theoretical contribution to the phenomenon of peer-to-peer information sharing.