Chat More and Contribute Better: An Empirical Study of a Knowledge-Sharing Community

with Chris Forman and Michael Kummer

Accepted at Information Systems Research [Available Online]

We analyze whether and under what conditions adding a new, informal space for interaction can improve knowledge exchange in an online community. We explore this question by analyzing the effects of introducing chat rooms in the Stack Overflow question-and-answer (Q&A) forum. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that the introduction of a chat room increases user contributions in related programming tags in the Q&A forum but only among community users who are active in the chat rooms. Improvements to question outcomes are concentrated among a closed subgroup of users who have been active in the chat room. We next study how these patterns change with the introduction of a bridging mechanism: a feed that pushes all questions from the Q&A forum to the chat room. Combining a chat room with a feed leads to faster answers that benefit a wider group of users than chat rooms alone. These findings have important implications for the design of new spaces in which users can interact in existing online communities. 

Price Obfuscation and Demand Shift: Evidence From a Field Experiment on a Hotel Booking Platform

with Anuj Kummar, Xitong Li and Xiang Wan

R&R at Information Systems Research

Online intermediary platforms are the marketplaces where consumers come to search and compare products from different sellers and make purchases. On one hand, online intermediary platforms may want to facilitate consumers’ price comparisons by listing price information of products from different sellers on the search result pages. On the other hand, online intermediary platforms may want to induce consumers to buy higher priced products by obfuscating prices. Given the trade-off between listing and obfuscating prices, it is important to understand the impact of search cost in price information on sellers and consumers on the online intermediary platforms. To answer this question, we conducted a large-scale field experiment on a leading hotel booking platform in China, examining the impact of hiding price information on the search result pages. Our market-level analysis shows that although hiding price information hurts overall demand, the reduction in demand for hotels with smaller past sales is much smaller than that for hotels with larger past sales. We also conduct user-level analysis and show that treated consumers decrease their booking probability, but the reduction in booking probability is largely driven by a decrease in demand for hotels with larger past sales.