Daegon Cho

The impacts of identity verification and disclosure of social cues on flaming in online user comments

Study examines a large news commenting data to understand anonymity effect on flaming.Different anonymity control mechanisms affect online flaming differently.Voluntary approach is more effective than policy approach in reducing flaming.Social commenting is more effective for frequent users than for one-time users. While a growing body of literature attests to the relationship between user identifiability and inflammatory speech online, few studies have investigated the ways in which different anonymity control mechanisms affect the quality of online discussions. In this study, two mechanisms, a policy-driven and a voluntary approach, are examined for their conditional and interaction effects on reducing flaming in user comments online. Based on a large-scale, real-world data on political news comments in South Korea, the results suggest that whereas the policy-driven regulation does not reduce, and even increases, flaming, the voluntary approach significantly decreases it, especially among the moderate commenters. The findings are further speculated from an economic perspective by which transaction costs are perceived differently contingent on the ways in which anonymous commenting is regulated.

Swearing Effects on Citizen-to-Citizen Commenting Online

Swearing, the use of taboo languages tagged with a high level of emotional arousal, has become commonplace in contemporary political culture. The current study attempts to understand the ways in which swearing influences citizen-to-citizen news commenting online. Based on a large corpus of the 2-month user comments from 26 news websites in South Korea, the study examines swearing effects as well as its interplay with anonymity on garnering public attention and shaping other users’ perceptions of the comments. Findings suggest that swearing generally has a positive effect on increasing user attention to comments as well as gaining other users’ approvals. Comparisons between political and nonpolitical topics further suggest that swearing effect on gaining public attention is particularly prominent for political discussions. In contrast, the magnitude of change toward positive valence in public perception to comments is much greater for nonpolitical topics than for politics. From the findings, we conclude that an acceptable degree of swearing norms in online discussions vary across news topical arenas. The results also lead to discussions about the possibility of like-minded exposure to political comments as a default condition for online discussions. Finally, the study highlights the role of high-arousal emotions in shaping discursive participation in contemporary networked sociodigital environment.

Characterizing the technological evolution of smartphones: insights from performance benchmarks

Recent technological advancements in smartphone have paved the way for the rapidly growing mobile commerce. As smartphone vendors launch the products with a rich variety of technical features for different end-user market segments, understanding the evolution of these features is of vital importance to all stakeholders in the smartphone industry. We address this issue by exploring technical specifications of smartphones at both the feature and the device level. In particular, we introduce the benchmarks to operationalize the overall performance of smartphone models, such that multidimensional technical features can be quantitatively summarized into a single index. Through the analysis of a comprehensive dataset entailing technical features for smartphone models launched during the years 2012-2015, we show that although certain features have become the standard functionality, the smartphone industry is largely innovative and continues to evolve over time. We believe our findings may provide important insights into the future development and design strategies of smartphones.

The Impact of Mobile Number Portability on Price, Competition and Consumer Welfare

This paper examines the effect of Mobile Number Portability (MNP) on market price and consumer surplus. MNP reduces switching costs by allowing consumers to keep their phone number when they change service provider. Most European countries introduced MNP in the early 2000s as a result of a mandate from the European Commission. This supra-national legislative shock provides a unique opportunity to study the relationship between switching costs, price and consumer surplus. Theory shows that market prices can either increase or decrease when switching costs reduce and that followers may try to take advantage of decreasing switching costs to attract consumers from the market leaders. Using quarterly data from 47 wireless service providers in 15 EU countries between 1999 and 2006, we find that MNP decreased market price by at least 4.15% and increased consumer welfare by at least 2.15 euros per person per quarter on average during our period of analysis. This amounts to 880 Million euros per quarter across the 15 EU countries analyzed in this paper and 15% of the observed increase in consumer surplus during the period of analysis. This result is obtained using cost-shifters to instrument changes in price, which allows for determining the demand curve in the markets we analyze. Our study shows how the European experience with regards to the introduction of MNP can be used as an example of best practice by other countries that plan to introduce it in the near future.

Internet Adoption and the Survival of Print Newspapers: A Country-Level Examination

In this paper we examine the effect of Internet adoption on daily print newspaper circulation and newspaper survival rates. We use country-level yearly panel data for more than ninety countries from 2000 through 2009. Our data contain information on Internet penetration, daily local and national print newspaper circulation, and the number of local and national print newspaper titles. Our results show that increases in Internet penetration can explain a large fraction of the recent decline in newspaper circulation and the number of newspaper titles. We also find that Internet adoption appears to affect the survival of local newspapers to a greater extent than for national newspapers. We argue that this might be due to local newspapers’ greater reliance on classified advertising. Our results further suggest that Internet adoption decreases country-level circulation rates by driving newspapers out of business without significantly affecting the net circulation rates of surviving newspapers. Because newspaper readership has been linked to the health of the democratic system, the importance of examining the decline of the newspaper industry extends beyond the literature on the media industry.

Behaviour-Based Market Segmentation of Travellers and Their Different Activities at Peer-to-Peer Online Travel Marketplace

Regarding the growing importance of the peer-to-peer online travel marketplace and lack of understanding on it, this study aims to investigate how different types of travellers use peer-to-peer online travel marketplaces in distinctive ways. Different traveller behaviours are measured using six factors from twenty items. 2467 survey respondents were combined with real transaction data. We identify six idiosyncratic groups of travellers. They are named Shopaholic, Budget Explore, Long-Term Traveller, Trend Setter, Resort Addict, and Social Tripper. Those groups are different in several aspects, such as demographic characteristics. More importantly, the results show their usage of the online tourism marketplace is significantly different. Our study contributes to the literature on traveller segmentation through an exploration of their different usage of online travel services. It also provides practical insights, especially for marketplace operators and travel product providers.

An Empirical Analysis of Frequency and Location of Concerts in the Digital Age

As recorded music sales have dropped, live performances have become an important revenue source for artists. In this context, we study how the geographical distribution of concerts has evolved during the digital music era. Using data on more than 33,000 concerts in the United States from 2000 to 2011, we investigate how the distribution of concert locations has evolved over time. Our analysis shows that artists performed more concerts from 2000 to 2011, and that these concerts became more geographically dispersed during this period.

Competing with Spams More Fiercely: An Empirical Study on the Effectiveness of Anti-Spam Legislation

Spam mail still accounts for more than 80% of the total email traffic. More recently, it has played a role as a potential propagator of vicious attacks such as viruses, phishing, and malware. Although anti-spam legislation has already been established in many countries, it appears to be ineffective. In this context, the anti-spam policy regime in South Korea was radically changed in November 2014, which provides a natural experimental setting to investigate the effect of the policy. The policy change includes a set of the substantially enhanced regulations, such as a transition from an “opt-out�? to an “opt-in�? approach, informed consent requirements periodically, and an increase of maximum penalty. This paper empirically tests whether the policy effectively reduced the intentions of spammers in South Korea. For empirical work, we use a unique and large-scale dataset of 5.6 billion spam messages originating from over 200 countries during a twenty-month period. Our main findings suggest that this policy change significantly decreased the spam volume in South Korea, compared to those originating from other countries. We conduct an additional economic analysis and find that the expected benefits for users are up to 150 million USD in the country. Despite the importance of preventing spams, there have surprisingly been few studies on the topic from the policy perspective in the information systems field. This paper contributes to the literature by highlighting the importance of the properly designed policy to reduce unsolicited messages on the Internet.

Platform Competition in the Video Game Console Industry: Impacts of Software Quality and Exclusivity on Market Share

ABSTRACT This study examines impacts of the complementary products on platform competition, in the context of video game consoles. Using 10-year panel data, the results demonstrate that high-quality software has a disproportionately significant effect on hardware demand. The high-quality exclusive software is an important factor affecting consumers’ utility, and it tends to be developed in hardware manufacturers’ vertically integrated subsidiaries. In addition, this study also identifies that high-quality multi-homing software plays a role in platform growth in a platform’s later stage.

An empirical analysis of the frequency and location of concerts in the digital age

As recorded music sales have dropped, live performances have become an important revenue source for artists. In this context, we study how the geographical distribution of concerts has evolved during the digital music era. Using data on more than 33,000 concerts in the United States from 2000 to 2011, we investigate how the distribution of concert locations has evolved over time. Our analysis shows that artists performed more concerts from 2000 to 2011, and that these concerts became more geographically dispersed during this period.