Third-party Websites Research Articles

E-retailing of restaurant services: pricing strategies in a competing online environment

Establishing online channels and providing online discounts by building business partner relationships with third-party websites have emerged as important and effective marketing strategies in the restaurant industry. This study examines the optimal pricing strategy of restaurants in a competing environment when they participate in this relationship with a third-party website. Results suggest that neither participation nor online price discount should be encouraged for all restaurants. In particular, for a restaurant with a fixed service capacity, participation and online price discount are recommended when the number of offline loyal customers is relatively small. With the increase in the number of loyal offline customers, the optimal online discount rate decreases, whereas the unit commission fee for the third-party website remains constant. When the optimal discount rate reaches zero, the optimal decision for the restaurant is to decrease the unit commission fee. Based on these findings, this study analytically provides the optimal pricing strategies for restaurants and the corresponding boundaries for the strategy set.

“A Light Switch in the #Brain”: Optogenetics on Social Media

Neuroscience communication is increasingly taking place on multidirectional social media platforms, creating new opportunities but also calling for critical ethical considerations. Twitter, one of the most popular social media applications in the world, is a leading platform for the dissemination of all information types, including emerging areas of neuroscience such as optogenetics, a technique aimed at the control of specific neurons. Since its discovery in 2005, optogenetics has been featured in the public eye and discussed extensively on social media, but little is known about how this new technique is portrayed and who the users participating in the conversation are. To address this gap, we conducted content analysis of a sample of 1000 tweets mentioning “optogenetics” over a one-year period between 2014 and 2015. We found that academic researchers are the largest group contributing to the conversation, that the tweets often contain links to third-party websites from news organizations and peer-reviewed journals, and that common thematic motifs include the applications of optogenetics specifically for the control of brain activity and the treatment of disease. We also found that the majority of the tweets are neutral in their tone regarding optogenetics. As Twitter serves as a current and dynamic forum for exchange about advances in neuroscience, the conversation about optogenetics on this engaging platform can inform socially-responsive knowledge dissemination efforts in this area.

Connecting Search Marketing to Hotel Revenue Management: Conjoint Analysis as a Methodology to Evaluate the Optimal Online Travel Agency Commission Fee

A growing amount of travel is booked through third-party Internet booking sites where the booking commission the hotels are charged is subject to negotiation. The fee varies, depending, among other things, on the search position a travel offering is advertised. In this paper we demonstrate how to quantify the value of the placement on the third-party search results page, and thus how to assess the appropriate placement associated fee taking the benefit of this position into account. A sample of 5,968 stated booking choices by 1,492 respondents on a fictitious online hotel booking website was analyzed using choice-based conjoint analysis. The empirical results support past observations and claims that the position of a hotel on the search page of a booking site has significant impact on the likelihood of being booked. We find, however, that this placement-based probability depends on the specific attributes of a hotel. The major contribution of this paper is the methodology we offer demonstrating how to determine the monetary value of various search results positions (listing on an online travel agent (OTA) site) for different hotel properties.

ESports: how to make money

LOS ANGELES had never seen anything quite like it. The city's Staples Centre usually played host to Lakers and Clippers basketball games - or, in the off-season, rowdy rock gigs. It had certainly never seen a capacity crowd turn up to watch a bunch of geeks play video games. And it wasn't just the 13,000-strong crowd. It was the 32 million people watching online. The event was the League of Legends Finals, and the prize for the most skilled team was the Summoner's Cup - and $1m in cash. Tickets for the event sold out in under an hour, and subsequently popped up on third-party sites like StubHub with prices in the hundreds of dollars.

The Effect of Internet Word-of-mouth on Experience Product Sales --- An Empirical Study Based on Film Online Reviews

When purchasing experience products, more and more modern consumers are inclined to make a purchase decision through internet word-of-mouth on third-party websites. Based on a sample panel data of online movie reviews from gewara.com, this paper analyzes the impact of online reviews on movie box-office revenue from three dimensions: review volume, review scores and star reviews. The results show that the online reviews have a significant impact on movie box-office revenue. Specifically, the review volume has a significant positive impact on box-office revenue, and the impact effect shows parabola trends overtime. The impact of star review on box-office revenue mainly occurred in the first week, and the negative effect of 1 star reviews exceeds the positive effect of 5 star reviews. Management implication is proposed based the results.

Integrating rich and heterogeneous information to design a ranking system for multiple products

The online review plays an important role as electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) for potential consumers to make informed purchase decisions. However, the large number of reviews poses a considerable challenge because it is impossible for customers to read all of them for reference. Moreover, there are different types of online reviews with distinct features, such as numeric ratings, text descriptions, and comparative words, for example; such heterogeneous information leads to more complexity for customers. In this paper, we propose a method to integrate such rich and heterogeneous information. The integrated information can be classified into two categories: descriptive information and comparative information. The descriptive information consists of online opinions directly given by consumers using text sentiments and numeric ratings to describe one specific product. The comparative information comes from comparative sentences that are implicitly embedded in the reviews and online comparative votes that are explicitly provided by third-party websites to compare more than one product. Both descriptive information and comparative information are integrated into a digraph structure, from which an overall eWOM score for each product and a ranking of all products can be derived. We collect both descriptive and comparative information for three different categories of products (mobile phones, laptops, and digital cameras) during a period of 10days. The results demonstrate that our method can provide improved performance compared with those of existing product ranking methods. A ranking system based on our method is also provided that can help consumers to compare multiple products and make appropriate purchase decisions effortlessly.

The Economics of Crowdfunding

An entrepreneur finances her project with common value via crowdfunding. She chooses a funding mechanism (fixed or flexible), a price, and a funding goal. Under fixed funding money is refunded if the goal is not met; under flexible funding the entrepreneur keeps the money. Backers observe signals about the value and decide whether to contribute or postpone purchase to the retail stage. The optimal crowdfunding campaign is characterized. We show that fixed funding campaigns perform better than the flexible ones through an application of the linkage principle, we also show that third-party crowdfunding sites serves as a commitment device that the entrepreneur will use to eliminate moral hazard.

The Upsides of a Negative Review

The Upsides of a Negative Review

Hotel Overbooking and Cooperation with Third-Party Websites

Hotels cooperate with third-party websites to enhance their competitive position and attain sustainable development in the era of e-commerce. Furthermore, hotel managers overbook to hedge against last-minute cancellations and customer no-shows. This paper discusses pricing and overbooking strategies of a hotel in the context of cooperation with multiple third-party websites and analyzes how these strategies influence the cooperation process. The increase in profits resulting from the overbooking strategy is also examined. A model of a Stackelberg game between the hotel and third-party websites and a Nash game among the third-party websites are developed to analyze the process. Results indicate that the compensation coefficient has a slight influence on hotel pricing strategy, but causes a sharp decrease in overbooking level. As the hotel demands to lessen the probability of denying under higher compensation rate, the third-party websites would exert less sales effort to reduce the demand of online customers. Results also show that under a given market demand, hotel effort only serves to redistribute market shares among the hotel and third-party websites, without influencing hotel pricing and overbooking decisions. Specifically, the market shares of the third-party websites decrease in the effort level of the hotel resulting from an increase in the hotel market share. Finally, in the numerical example where one hotel and two websites are analyzed, hotel overbooking strategy improves hotel profit by 4.20%, whereas profit improvements for Websites 1 and 2 are as high as 5.26% and 5.21%, respectively. Managerial implications of the study are also provided.

Qualitative website analysis of information on birth after caesarean section.

BackgroundThe United Kingdom (UK) caesarean section (CS) rate is largely determined by reluctance to augment trial of labour and vaginal birth. Choice between repeat CS and attempting vaginal birth after CS (VBAC) in the next pregnancy is challenging, with neither offering clear safety advantages. Women may access online information during the decision-making process. Such information is known to vary in its support for either mode of birth when assessed quantitatively. Therefore, we sought to explore qualitatively, the content and presentation of web-based health care information on birth after caesarean section (CS) in order to identify the dominant messages being conveyed.MethodsThe search engine Google™ was used to conduct an internet search using terms relating to birth after CS. The ten most frequently returned websites meeting relevant purposive sampling criteria were analysed. Sampling criteria were based upon funding source, authorship and intended audience. Images and written textual content together with presence of links to additional media or external web content were analysed using descriptive and thematic analyses respectively.ResultsTen websites were analysed: five funded by Government bodies or professional membership; one via charitable donations, and four funded commercially. All sites compared the advantages and disadvantages of both repeat CS and VBAC. Commercially funded websites favoured a question and answer format alongside images, ‘pop-ups’, social media forum links and hyperlinks to third-party sites. The relationship between the parent sites and those being linked to may not be readily apparent to users, risking perception of endorsement of either VBAC or repeat CS whether intended or otherwise. Websites affiliated with Government or health services presented referenced clinical information in a factual manner with podcasts of real life experiences. Many imply greater support for VBAC than repeat CS although this was predominantly conveyed through subtle use of words rather than overt messages, with the exception of the latter being apparent in one site.ConclusionsWebsites providing information on birth after CS appear to vary in nature of content according to their funding source. The most user-friendly, balanced and informative websites appear to be those funded by government agencies.

How hotel responses to online reviews differ by hotel rating: an exploratory study

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how hotels respond to online reviews on a third-party Web site (such as TripAdvisor) based on the hotel’s star rating. Design/methodology/approach – Content analysis was used to compare responses to online hotel reviews at five different levels of hotel based on a star-rating system ranging from one star to five stars. Findings – Most hotel managers’ response rates were low, and they paid the most attention to positive comments. Managers at four- and five-star hotels more often responded to negative online reviews. Guest service manager was the most common job title of managers who responded to guests’ reviews. Research limitations/implications – This paper is limited to an analysis of ten hotels, two for each of the five-star ratings. More hotel cases with long-term data collection involving the use of the star-rating system may provide more insights on this discussion. Practical implications – The exploratory study sought to identify strategies for managing online reviews in the lodging industry. Hotel managers should respond to negative online reviews with appreciation, apology and an explanation of what went wrong. Moreover, hotels may need a designated person to observe and respond to guest comments on their Web sites and third-party Web sites. A designated person is also needed to monitor online comments and communicate with guests to better manage the hotel’s online reputation. Originality/value – As an exploratory research project, this paper expands the understanding of hotel managers’ responses to their guests’ online reviews in an attempt to identify best practices for the industry.

Dawn of a New Era

Dawn of a New Era

An empirical study of how third-party websites influence the feedback mechanism between online Word-of-Mouth and retail sales

Firms use social media marketing to promote products and collect consumer feedback for the product development process. Their practice of investing in retailer-hosted Word-of-Mouth (internal WOM) is supported by a positive feedback mechanism between internal WOM and retail sales. Internal WOM is a sales influencer: consumers can get informed about a product by a large volume of internal WOM. It is also a sales outcome: greater past sales lead to more WOM. Beyond internal WOM, consumers are shown to search widely for product information on third-party websites. Consequently, many firms also start to invest in content on third-party websites. However, little is known regarding the interplay between internal WOM and the contents of third-party websites, which have both been invested in by firms in recent years. In the context of the online software market, this study examines how WOM hosted by third-party websites (external WOM) and third-party free sampling influence the feedback mechanism between internal WOM and retail sales. Using data from Download.com and Amazon.com, we analyze the impact via a simultaneous equation model in a Bayesian hierarchical framework. We find that external WOM and third-party free sampling moderate the sales-outcome role of internal WOM in different ways. Receiving external user reviews amplifies the impact of past sales on volume of internal WOM; whereas third-party free sampling weakens the impact of past sales on internal WOM. Moreover, this impact of external WOM and third-party free sampling on the sales-outcome role of internal WOM is much more significant than their impact on the sales-influencer role of internal WOM.

Substitution or Promotion? The Impact of Price Discounts on Cross-Channel Sales of Digital Movies

Technology is transforming the marketing function in many ways, and this transformation is particularly apparent for information goods such as movies where digital technologies provide marketers with new distribution channels, which in turn create new opportunities for cross-channel effects. However, these digital channels also provide researchers with new opportunities to measure micro-level customer behavior to understand the impact of cross-channel effects in real-world settings.In this paper, we study cross-channel effects between movies sold in digital purchase (commonly known as Electronic Sell Through or EST) and digital rental (commonly known as Video-On-Demand or VOD) markets. We do this using a unique sales dataset from a major digital movie retailer provided by a major movie studio. Our analysis takes advantage of a 14-week field experiment that allows us to measure the impact of price discounts on own- and cross-channel sales. We use this experiment to estimate own and cross price elasticities, whether price discounts cannibalize future sales, and most importantly whether price discounts in one channel affect sales for the same product in a presumably competing channel.Our analysis indicates that digital movie consumers are highly sensitive to price promotions. However, we also find that, contrary to expectations, price promotions in a digital sales channel for a movie do not seem to cannibalize digital rentals. Indeed, our results suggest that, if anything, price promotions for digital movie sales can increase digital rentals. We explore a variety of explanations for this counterintuitive result, including the possibility that the ease of information transmission online through third-party websites, blogs, and online discussion areas may create information spillovers such that price discounts in one channel may increase product awareness in other competing sales channels. From a managerial perspective, our results suggest that cross-channel cannibalization can be reduced or even reversed in the presence of information spillovers, and that there are many new opportunities for marketers to directly measure these cross-channel effects using experimental data from online platforms.

Generic constructions for role-based encryption

Due to the enormous growth in the amount of digital information that needs to be stored, outsourcing data to third-party storage service providers, such as cloud, have attracted much attention in recent times. This has raised significant security issues such as how to control access to outsourced data stored on third-party sites. There have been many works on access control in the literature, and one of the well-known access control models is the role-based access control (RBAC), which provides flexible control and management by having two level mappings, users to roles and roles to privileges on data objects. Several cryptographic RBAC schemes have been proposed which integrate cryptographic techniques with RBAC models to enforce RBAC policies. In this paper, we develop the first generic constructions for cryptographic RBAC schemes which we refer to as role-based encryption (RBE) schemes. A RBE scheme allows data to be encrypted in such a way that only users with specific roles can decrypt the data. Hence, it can be used to enforce RBAC policies in an outsourcing environment. Our constructions use ID-based broadcast encryption (IBBE) techniques to build RBE schemes, and we show that the RBE scheme built from our generic constructions is secure if the selected IBBE scheme is secure. We also compare these constructions and analyse the advantages and disadvantages of each construction type.

A New Form for a Hotel to Collaborate with a Third-Party Website: Setting Online-Exclusive-Rooms

The collaboration on hotel room booking service between hotels and third-party websites provides hotels much benefit on increasing capacity utilization. But the commonly used “first-come first-serve” (FCFS) form put hotels in a disadvantageous position especially when the websites have much more market attractiveness than the hotels. This paper proposes a new form named “setting Online-Exclusive-Rooms (OERs)” for a hotel to collaborate with a third-party website on room booking service. The form is presented by solving a two-stage decision problem: in the first stage, the hotel determines the quantity of OERs which can only be booked online through the third-party website; in the second stage, the hotel sets an acceptance policy to treat the additional request from the website. Analytical results indicate that “setting OERs” can improve the expected revenue of hotels compared with the current widely used “FCFS” form.

Concrete Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme with Verifiable Outsourced Decryption

As more sensitive data is shared and stored by third-party sites on the internet, there will be a need to encrypt data stored at these sites. One drawback of encrypting data is that it can be selectively shared only at a coarse-grained level. Attribute based encryption is a public-key-based one-to-many encryption that allows users to encrypt and decrypt data based on user attributes. A promising application of ABE is flexible access control of encrypted data stored in the cloud using access policies and ascribed attributes associated with private keys and ciphertexts. This functionality comes at a cost. In typical implementation, the size of the ciphertext is proportional to the number of attributes associated with it and the decryption time is proportional to the number of attributes used during decryption. Specially, many practical ABE implementations require one pairing operation per attribute used during decryption. One of the main efficiency drawbacks of the existing ABE schemes is that decryption involves expensive pairing operations and the number of such operations grows with the complexity of the access policy. Recently green et al. proposed an ABE system with outsourced decryption that largely eliminates the decryption overhead for users. tn such a system a user provides an untrusted server, say a cloud to translate any ABE ciphertext satisfied by that user’s attributes or access policy into a simple ciphertext and it only incurs a small computational overhead for the users to recover the plaintext from the transformed ciphertext. Security of an ABE system with outsourced decryption ensures that an adversary will not be able to learn anything about the encrypted message; however it does not guarantee the correctness of the transformation done by the cloud. In this paper we consider a new requirement of ABE with outsourced decryption: verifiability. Informally, verifiability guarantees that a user can effectively check if the transformation is done correctly. We prove that our new scheme is both secure and verifiable without relying on random oracles. Finally, we show an implementation scheme and result of performance measurements, which indicates a significant reduction on computing resources imposed on users.

Distributive Veterinary Clinical Education: A Model of Clinical-Site Selection

The distributive model at the Western University of Health Sciences College of Veterinary Medicine (WesternU-CVM) utilizes third-party clinical sites rather than a traditional on-campus teaching hospital during years 3 and 4 of the curriculum. All veterinary schools are required by the American Veterinary Medical Association's accreditation standards to ensure that students are exposed to a diverse case load of sufficient number with active participation in the diagnostic work-up and treatment of patients. With one centralized teaching hospital, monitoring this aspect of the student experience is relatively straightforward. The distributive model of clinical veterinary education poses several challenges not encountered in a teaching hospital due to the number of clinical sites involved in delivering the curriculum. This article describes a clinical-site and preceptor selection process and the guidelines currently used to evaluate whether clinical sites and preceptors are suitable for initial inclusion in the program at WesternU-CVM. Outcomes data regarding the number and variety of student case exposures, student involvement in case management, and student evaluations of clinical experience are presented. These data suggest that the recruitment and selection process described here results in diverse and ample case-load exposure opportunities in a distributive model of veterinary education.

Information Portals: A New Tool for Teaching Information Literacy Skills

Librarians at Rice and Purdue Universities created novel assignments to teach students important information literacy skills. The assignments required the students to use a third-party web site, PageFlakes and NetVibes, respectively, to create a dynamically updated portal to information they needed for their research and class projects. The use of off-the-shelf web 2.0 technology to enable students to discover the latest information in their subject areas of interest provides an engaging, hands-on environment with immediate feedback on the quality of their searching. The authors provide a basic introduction to the use of the 'portal' web site. Then, the results of using this technique, for graduate students in physics in one case and junior/senior level undergraduates in the other, are analyzed, and recommendations for the integration of this type of assignment in other courses are given.

The Malthusian Paradox: performance in an alternate reality game

The Malthusian Paradox is a transmedia alternate reality game (ARG) created by artists Dominic Shaw and Adam Sporne played by 300 participants over 3 months. We explore the design of the game, which cast players as agents of a radical organisation attempting to uncover the truth behind a kidnapping and a sinister biotech corporation and highlight how it redefined performative frames by blurring conventional performer and spectator roles in sometimes discomforting ways. Players participated in the game via a broad spectrum of interaction channels, including performative group spectacles and 1-to-1 engagements with game characters in public settings, making use of low- and high-tech physical and online artefacts including bespoke and third-party websites. Players and game characters communicated via telephony and social media in both a designed and an ad hoc manner. We reflect on the production and orchestration of the game, including the dynamic nature of the strong episodic narrative driven by professionally produced short films that attempted to respond to the actions of players and the difficulty of designing for engagement across hybrid and temporally expansive performance space. We suggest that an ARG whose boundaries are necessarily unclear affords rich and emergent, but potentially unsanctioned and uncontrolled, opportunities for interactive performance, which raises significant challenges for design.