When gamification backfires: the impact of perceived justice on online community contributions

ABSTRACT

While online communities may enhance firm performance, they commonly fail to retain members. To address this challenge, scholars and managers call for the use of gamification. However, despite gamification’s growing use in online communities, insight into its effect on member experience and behaviours remain limited. We hypothesise that gamification affects member-perceived distributive and procedural justice. In experimental studies, we assess the impact of in-gamification perceived justice on member contributions. We find that while high in-gamification perceived procedural justice acts as a necessary prerequisite for member contributions, high distributive justice can reduce game-related uncertainty, thereby rendering gamified practices less fun, particularly for low-engaged community members that tend to value rewards. We add to the literature by (a) pinpointing the core role of perceived justice in the persistence of online communities, and (b) unveiling that high distributive justice can lead gamification to backfire in online communities by affecting member experience and contributions.     

A note on how to measure hubbing practices in airline networks

Benefits and costs associated to hubbing practices of airlines are still subject to much debate. In the previous literature, some standard spatial concentration indices have been proposed to measure it. However, we show that these indices are “ill-defined” because they do not take into account the salient characteristic of hubbing: connecting passengers. The purpose of this research is to present a new methodology which avoids the pitfalls of other methods. Our new methodology also analyzes the level of concentration of the connecting passengers studying two different dimensions: hub airports and routes. Finally, we apply our methodology to some US carriers.     

Economic Recovery in the Age of COVID-19

Economic recovery post-COVID-19 will be structured around answering a number of fundamental questions. It is necessary to take stock of the extent of the recovery and of the transformation our economies have experienced in the last year and a half.

     

Amending China’s Notion of a “Consumer”: Lessons from Comparative Analysis of the PRC Consumer Protection Law

Who does the law treat as a “consumer” and why does it matter? How should China’s notion of a “consumer” best be articulated within the law and applied in practice? This article will attempt to answer these intriguing questions by first focusing on the approach taken to define a “consumer” in China’s Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests before examining the legal notion of a “consumer” in comparative perspective, in order to further understand the competing rationales behind the consumer protection law. This article will explore this Chinese definition of a “consumer” to propose how China’s vague and unworkable statutory definition of a ‘consumer’ should be amended in future.

     

The Inhibitory Effect of Political Conservatism on Consumption: The Case of Fair Trade

Journal of Business Ethics - By synthesizing the argumentation theory of new rhetoric with research on heuristics and motivated reasoning, we develop a conceptual view of argumentation based on...     

Search reduction in hierarchical distributed problem solving

Knoblock and Korf have determined that abstraction can reduce search at a single agent from exponential to linear complexity (Knoblock 1991; Korf 1987). We extend their results by showing how concurrent problem solving among multiple agents using abstraction can further reduce search to logarithmic complexity. We empirically validate our formal analysis by showing that it correctly predicts performance for the Towers of Hanoi problem (which meets all of the assumptions of the analysis). Furthermore, a powerful form of abstraction for large multiagent systems is to group agents into teams, and teams of agents into larger teams, to form an organizational pyramid. We apply our analysis to such an organization of agents and demonstrate the results in a delivery task domain. Our predictions about abstraction's benefits can also be met in this more realistic domain, even though assumptions made in our analysis are violated. Our analytical results thus hold the promise for explaining in general terms many experimental observations made in specific distributed AI systems, and we demonstrate this ability with examples from prior research.This research has been sponsored, in part, by the National Science Foundation under grants IRI-9015423 and IRI-9010645, by the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School, and by a Bell Northern Research Postgraduate Award.     

The Staff Ride: Developing Historical Sense in Army Leaders

In the current essay, the author draws on his experience as a serving member of the Armed Forces to discuss the problem of developing military leaders capable of mitigating the disruptive nature of war. Specifically, it discusses the staff ride, a comprehensive analysis of historical events conducted through observation, reflection, and discussion, to develop in leaders an understanding that nothing ever works out the way a leader intends or expects. For the military leader facing the uncertainty and ambiguity of modern combat, this lesson from history is arguably the most essential.     

The valuation consequences of voluntary accounting changes

Firm management typically claims that voluntary accounting method changes (VACs) are made to enhance the informativeness of earnings by better matching accounting practices with economic reality. In contrast, skeptics argue that managers adopt new accounting procedures to opportunistically manage earnings and influence their firm’s stock price. In this paper, we investigate these alternative motives for VACs. Specifically, we investigate whether VACs cause equity prices to deviate from their fundamental values in the short-term by studying the long-run stock-price performance for a sample of firms that voluntarily change accounting methods. In addition, we investigate changes in earnings informativeness by examining the behavior of earning response coefficients and the relationship between earnings and future cash flows in years surrounding the VAC event. In contrast to prior research, we find little evidence that a strategy based solely on the earnings effect of a VAC can generate abnormal returns. While we find weak evidence of post-VAC abnormal returns for extreme VACs, this result appears to be driven by the accruals anomaly documented in Sloan [Sloan, R. G. (1996). The Accounting Review, 71, 289–315]. Our evidence further suggests that earnings informativeness is not significantly altered by voluntary changes in accounting methods. Taken together, our evidence suggests the market recognizes the financial statement effects of alternative acceptable accounting methods and efficiently processes the valuation implications of VACs.

Zur Integration heuristischer Managementstrategien in die Dynamische Finanzanalyse

Dynamic financial analysis (DFA) has become an important tool in analyzing the financial situation of insurance companies. Constant development and documentation of DFA tools has occurred during the last years. However, several questions concerning the implementation of DFA systems have not been answered in the DFA literature to date. One such important issue is the consideration of management strategies in the DFA context. The aim of this paper is to study the effects of different management strategies on a non-life insurer’s risk and return profile. Therefore, we extend the results of a recent working paper by Eling / Parnitzke / Schmeiser (2007) with two variants and test these variants numerically within a DFA simulation study.