Research

Journal Publications

Liu, Jialu, and Kim, Keehyung, 2023 “Designing Contests for Data Science Competitions: Number of Stages and Prize Structures”. Production and Operations Management, 32 (11), 3752-3772. [Working Paper] [Online Appendix]

Click for abstract Firms have been proactively holding data science competitions via online contest platforms to look for innovative solutions from the crowd. When firms are designing such competitions, a key question is: What should be a better contest design to motivate contestants to exert more effort? We model two commonly observed contest structures (one-stage and two-stage) and two widely adopted prize structures (high-spread and low-spread). We employ economic experiments to examine how contest design affects contestants’ effort level. The results reject the base model with rationality assumption. We find that contestants exert significantly more effort in both the first stage and the second stage of the two-stage contest. Moreover, it is better to assign most prizes to the winner in the two-stage contest while it does not matter in one-stage. To explain the empirical regularities, we develop a behavioral economics model that captures contestants’ psychological aversion to falling behind and continuous exertion of effort. Our findings demonstrate that it is important for contest organizers to account for the non-pecuniary factors that can influence contestants’ behavior in designing a competition.

Liu, Jialu, Pei, Siqi, and Zhang, Xiaoquan, 2023 “Online Food Delivery Platforms and Female Labor Force Participation”. Information Systems Research, forthcoming. [Working Paper] [Online Appendix]

Click for abstract The literature often explains female labor force participation through factors such as schooling, wage gaps, and fertility. In this study, we identify how technology-induced time savings from household chores increase female labor force participation in South Korea. Using a leads-and-lags difference-in-differences model, we find that the entry of online food delivery platform significantly increased the female employment rate in the three years following the platform’s entry, and the results still hold after excluding employment in the food and beverage sector. Our further analyses show that such digital platforms offered a pathway for women to break free from traditional household roles, thus granting them more time and the opportunity to decide whether to join the labor market or stay at home. We examine the positive externalities generated by the online food delivery platform and find that this new technology-induced female employment accounted for 0.27% of South Korea’s GDP, or 17 times the platform’s direct revenue.

Working Papers

Indirect Value of Public Infrastructure Technology

Carbon Regulation and Inventory

Livestream Commerce

Conferences

“Your Movement in a City Reveals Your Credit”, (with Youngsok Bang), Post-ICIS KrAIS Research Workshop 2021, December 2021. (KrAIS Best Student Paper Award)

“Your Movement in a City Reveals Your Credit”, (with Youngsok Bang), Korea Intelligent Information Systems Society Fall Conference 2021 (KIISS 2021), December 2021. (KIISS Best Paper Award)

“Risk Disclosure Policy in Crowdfunding”, (with Siqi Pei, Keehyung Kim), 17th Symposium on Statistical Challenges in Electronic Commerce Research (SCECR 2021), June 2021

“Online Food Delivery Platforms and Female Labor Force Participation”, (with Siqi Pei, Xiaoquan Michael Zhang) 31st Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE), December 2020. (WISE Best Paper Award)

“Designing Multi-Stage Contests”, (with Keehyung Kim), 2020 INFORMS Annual Meeting, November 2020

“Designing Multi-Stage Contests: Does the Contest Structure Matter?”, (with Keehyung Kim), 16th Symposium on Statistical Challenges in Electronic Commerce Research (SCECR 2020), June 2020

“Your Movement in a City Tells Your Credit: Credit Default Prediction based on Geolocation Information”, (with Youngsok Bang). 13th China Summer Workshop on Information Management (CSWIM), June 2019, Shenzhen, China

“Your Movement in a City Tells Your Credit: Credit Default Prediction based on Geolocation Information”, (with Youngsok Bang). 2018 INFORMS Marketing Science Conference, June 2018, Pennsylvania, USA

Last Updated: Sep 2023