Extension of Switching Costs Antecedents Based on Customers＇ Social Ties

The effects of customers' social ties on switching costs have recently attracted researchers' attention.This study formally included customers' social ties as a new antecedent to supplement those elucidated by Burnham in 2003.Through empirical research,this study successfully verified the reliability and validity of items created to measure social ties,and it demonstrated the facilitating effects of social ties as an antecedent on customers' procedural and relational switching costs.Finally,the study lists managerial implications aimed at retaining customers through knowledge of this added antecedent.

Firm review revelation policy considering social ties among consumers

An optimization model is proposed to analyze the optimal review revelation policies and consumer online social network management strategies of e-commerce firms.The results show that displaying friend reviews to consumers does not necessarily increase firms profits.Only when positive reviews account for a large proportion of all the reviews and when the cost of showing friend reviews is not high,can showing friend reviews be more profitable than not showing such information.The distribution of social ties among consumers can affect firms profits.Even in the case that showing friend reviews to consumers is more profitable,an increase in the proportion of strong ties is not necessarily beneficial to firms.Only when the proportion of positive reviews is large enough,can firms profits increase with the increase in the proportion of strong ties among consumers.Moreover,the degree of consumer distrust in the average quality rating can also affect firms strategies for managing consumer online social networks.As the degree of consumer distrust in the average quality rating rises,firms are more likely to obtain higher profits by taking measures to increase the proportion of strong ties among consumers on their websites.

Monetary incentives and social ties in academic publications

Monetary incentives underlie academic publications,especially in countries where many researchers'incomes are performance-based.Evidence has documented that social ties improve the chances of publication in journals,whereas building and maintaining social ties require resources.We develop a simple model to investigate the consequences of monetary investment on the probability of publication through social ties.The results indicate that monetary incentive can stimulate researchers to make more efforts regarding publication.Through social ties,monetary investment in the process of academic publication distorts researchers'incentive.Monetary investment through social ties improves the probability of publication and then disables the signaling function of publication in terms of researchers'abilities.Depending on the contribution of different types of researchers to society and the ability of the latter to differentiate the quality of publication in journals,the improvement in publication probability by monetary investment through social ties may improve or reduce the level of social welfare.

Social-Aware Joint Mode Selection and Link Allocation for Device-to-Device Communication Underlaying Cellular Networks

Joint mode selection and link allocation are crucial to achieve the advantage of Device-to-Device(D2 D) communications in improving spectral efficiency. In practice, cellular users tend to not be totally altruistic or absolutely selfish. How to stimulate them to devote their links and how to allocate their links to D2 D pair candidates efficiently are two main challenges. In this paper, we encourage cellular users through the variable payment with regard to the social tie strength between cellular users and D2 D pair candidates. In particular, the social tie strength is inferred through a graph inference model and its impact on the payment is quantified as a negative exponential function. Then, we propose a resource scheduling optimization model based on the non-transferable utility coalition formation game, and a distributed coalition formation algorithm based on the Pareto preference and merge-and-split rule. From them, the final coalition structure is obtained, which reflects the strategy of mode selection and link allocation. Numerical results are presented to verify the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.

Understanding the mechanism of social tie in the propagation process of social network with communication channel

The propagation of information in online social networks plays a critical role in modern life,and thus has been studied broadly.Researchers have proposed a series of propagation models,generally,which use a single transition probability or consider factors such as content and time to describe the way how a user activates her/his neighbors.However,the research on the mechanism how social ties between users play roles in propagation process is still limited.Specifically,comprehensive summary of factors which affect user’s decision whether to share neighbor’s content was lacked in existing works,so that the existing models failed to clearly describe the process a user be activated by a neighbor.To this end,in this paper,we analyze the close correspondence between social tie in propagation process and communication channel,thus we propose to exploit the communication channel to describe the information propagation process between users,and design a social tie channel(STC)model.The model can naturally incorporate many factors affecting the information propagation through edges such as content topic and user preference,and thus can effectively capture the user behavior and relationship characteristics which indicate the property of a social tie.Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on content sharing prediction between users.