To Diversify or Not? Multi-Platform Social Media Strategy and E-Commerce Performance

Funded Research Proposal

Xiaoning (Gavin) Wang, PhD Candidate, Lynn Wu, Operations, Information and Decisions, and Serguei Netessine, Operations, Information and Decisions, The Wharton School Abstract: As the number of social platforms has grown dramatically in the past two decades, companies face an increasing number of options to choose among for their social media resourceRead More

Social Media and Startup Innovation: A Human Capital Perspective

Funded Research Proposal

In this study we plan to fill this research gap by examining whether social media can help startups to access broader knowledge and subsequently facilitate innovation. Our goal is twofold in this research. First, we explore the effect of social media adoption on startup’s knowledge diversity. Second, we analyze whether startups can successfully transfer the diversified knowledge into innovations.Read More

Implications of Revenue Models and Technology for Content Moderation Strategies

Working Papers

This paper develops a theoretical model to study the economic incentives for a social media platform to moderate user-generated content. We show that a self-interested platform can use content moderation as an effective marketing tool to expand its installed user base, to increase the utility of its users, and to achieve its positioning as a moderate or extreme content platform.Read More

Social Media, Entrepreneurship and Institutional Environment

Funded Research Proposal

Entrepreneurial strategies to cope with dynamic environments are becoming increasingly important globally with the heightened technological and institutional disruptions in the recent and coming years. These dynamic environments are usually characterized by high velocity, complexity, ambiguity and unpredictability, creating additional challenges for entrepreneurs to find and realize opportunitiesRead More

Social Media and Content Regulation

Funded Research Proposal

A significant challenge that online social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter face today is acting as the custodians of the Internet while at the same time being the center of self-expression and user-generated content.Read More

Data Analytics, Innovation, and Firm Productivity

Published Research

This study focuses on how data analytics talent in firms can have an effect on firms’ return on their technology investment. Especially with the rise of social media, cloud computing, as well as many other technologies that can capture detailed digital trace about various human interactions, we hope to understand how some firms can capture the value of the data and gain competitive advantage while some could not.Read More

Women, Rails and Telegraphs: An Empirical Study of Information Diffusion and Collective Action

Working Papers

How do social interactions shape collective action, and how are they mediated by the availability of networked information technologies? To answer these questions, we study the Temperance Crusade, one of the earliest instances of organized political mobilization by women in the U.S. Read More

Network Overlap and Content Sharing on Social Media Platforms

Published Research

We study the impact of network overlap — the overlap in network connections between two users — on content sharing in directed social media platforms. We propose a hazards model that flexibly captures the impact of three different measures of network overlap (i.e., common followees, common followers and common mutual followers) on content sharing.Read More

Advertising Content and Consumer Engagement on Social Media: Evidence from Facebook

Published Research

We describe the effect of social media advertising content on customer engagement using data from Facebook. We content-code 106,316 Facebook messages across 782 companies, using a combination of Amazon Mechanical Turk and Natural Language Processing algorithms.Read More

Social Is the New Financial: How Startup Social Media Activity Influences Funding Outcomes

Working Papers

In this project, we explore the impact of startup firms’ social media activities on their entrepreneurial financing performance. Social media can mitigate information problems in entrepreneurial financing in two ways.Read More