Jhih-Hua Jhang-Li

Knowledge sharing in communities of practice: A game theoretic analysis

This research applies game theory to analyze the incentives of knowledge-sharing activities in various types of communities of practice (COPs), characterized by individual profiles and decision structures. Indeed, individual decision making results in the under-provision of knowledge; however, the benefit of knowledge sharing may be raised by IT investment and suitable incentive mechanisms we study here. In general conditions, improving communication and collaboration technologies should be prior to developing data mining technologies. However, when the number of community members is sufficiently small and the heterogeneity of the expected value of knowledge among community members is sufficiently large, developing data mining technologies should be considered more important than the other if most community members are low-type ones. On the other hand, based on a screening technique, we find that the benefit of knowledge sharing in the incomplete information setting can be the same as that in the complete information setting if the cost of more efficient community member is smaller than that of less efficient one.

Pricing display ads and contextual ads: Competition, acquisition, and investment

Most websites are simultaneously supported by display advertising and contextual advertising. In this paper, we develop an economic model to examine the profitability of these two ad types in both a monopolistic market and duopolistic market, identifying the influence of impression benefit and click benefit. We find that in the duopolistic market a rival channels professional ability to enhance a visitors impression is beneficial to the channel offering contextual advertising. We also find that the strength of a search engine is limited in the duopolistic market; therefore, acquisition becomes a prime strategy to reveal the value of contextual advertising.

Analysis of pricing strategies for community-based group buying: The impact of competition and waiting cost

Group buying is one of the major pricing mechanisms in which retailers can offer low group rates due to a saving on transaction costs and its target consumers are those with lower sensitivity on waiting time. Under group buying, group size significantly affects the waiting cost to which consumers have different tolerances. In this paper, we develop a two-stage pricing game to evaluate the impact of the waiting cost, competition, and group-facilitating technology on the profitability and efficiency of community-based group buying. Our results point out that when a monopolistic retailer operates a mixed channel, the retailer will charge a relatively high group rates in the group-buying channel to force most consumers to choose individual buying unless the transaction cost in the individual-buying channel is sufficiently high. If two competing retailers adopt different pure channels, investment in group-facilitating technology may weaken the profit of the retailer adopting community-based group buying when the actual selling-cost saving resulted from community-based group buying is not significant.

Analyzing online B2B exchange markets: Asymmetric cost and incomplete information

This research applies the discriminating auction to analyze the online B2B exchange market in which a single buyer requests multiple items and several suppliers having equal capacity and asymmetric cost submit bids to compete for buyer demand. In the present model, we examine the impact of asymmetric cost and incomplete information on the participants in the market. Given the complete cost information, each supplier randomizes its price and the lower bound of the price range is determined by the highest marginal cost. In addition, the supplier with a lower marginal cost has a larger considered pricing space but ultimately has a smaller equilibrium one than others with higher marginal costs. When each supplier’s marginal cost is private information, the lowest possible price is determined by the number of suppliers and the buyer’s reservation price. Comparing these two market settings, we find whether IT is beneficial to buyers or suppliers depends on the scale of the bid process and the highest marginal cost. When the number of suppliers and the difference between the highest marginal cost and the buyer’s reservation price are sufficiently large, each supplier can gain a higher profit if the marginal costs are private information. On the contrary, when the highest marginal cost approaches the buyer’s reservation price, complete cost information benefits the suppliers.

Efficiency analysis for display ads and contextual search

Most News Web sites provide display ads and contextual ads, which are the main ad formats in Internet. Unlike display ads, contextual ad is a performance based advertisement and allows clients to bid for their exposure rate. Not only do Web sites save operation costs but also clients plan their budget flexibly. However, in addition to accuracy of search results, contextual ads like a common resource pool will spend much more time to take the same number of clicks as display ads do. In this paper, we develop a simple economic model to examine the profitability and social efficiency of contextual ads under monopolistic and duopolistic market structures.

Reward mechanisms for P2P VoIP networks

As we have seen, P2P VoIP software, such as Skype, has emerged from the current generation of telecommunication systems. However, establishing communication applications based on P2P networks without considering the operational models of the Internet presents potential dangers. In this study, we treat a VoIP telephone conversation as a dynamic game and compare the ex post reward mechanism with the ex ante reward mechanism in forward versus discard and QoS routing. Our simulation results point out that the ex post reward mechanism is better than the ex ante reward mechanism in forward versus discard; however, the opposite holds true in QoS routing when the expected number of periods is sufficiently large. In addition, this study considers the reward mechanisms and the platform provider’s benefit to find the optimal number of supernodes in a transmission path.

Optimal strategies of IT consulting firms: the impact of license fee and open source

In this paper, we develop an economic model to study the impact of commercial software and open source codes on the solutions offered by IT consulting firms. Robust support and trust are the most important assets of the IT solution built on commercial software, whereas cost savings is the major reason for adopting the IT solution developed by open source codes. The study aims to characterize the difference between the IT solutions by the demand for the number of licenses and the distribution of IT knowledge level. We find that the distribution of IT knowledge level on the pricing strategy of the IT consulting firm offering the solution built on open source codes is not monotonic. Moreover, from the viewpoint of efficiency and profit maximization, we find that IT consulting firm should help enterprise customers enhance their IT knowledge as it can offer the solutions built on different software packages.