Tag Archives: big data

From Spacing to Scheduling: The Effect of Seller Posting Time Strategies for Short Video Advertising

Yuan, Lin, Gene Moo Lee, Hao Xia, Qiang Ye. “From Spacing to Scheduling: The Effect of Seller Posting Time Strategies for Short Video Advertising”, Accepted at CIST 2023.

We examine how a seller’s posting time strategies of short video advertising affect consumer engagement and product sales. Drawing on the two-factory theory, we develop hypotheses on the effects of ad spacing and scheduling on ad effectiveness. The empirical results based on a unique short video ad dataset from Douyin, the Chinese counterpart of TikTok, indicate that there exists an inverted U-shape relationship between ad spacing and sales. Also, certain posting times significantly increase ad effectiveness. Interestingly, the effects of posting time strategies manifest under specific conditions: the effects of ad spacing on consumer purchase are strengthened for products with higher discounts, while this moderating effect is diverse for different posting times. These results provide nuanced insights to help ad managers make strategic decisions on ad posting times in the important context of social commerce.

Xiaoke Zhang’s Master’s Thesis

Xiaoke Zhang (2023). “How Does AI-Generated Voice Affect Online Video Creation? Evidence from TikTok”, Master’s Thesis, University of British Columbia

Supervisors: Gene Moo Lee, Mi Zhou

The rising demand for online video content has fostered one of the fastest-growing markets as evidenced by the popularity of platforms like TikTok. Because video content is often difficult to create, platforms have attempted to leverage recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) to help creators with their video creation process. However, surprisingly little is known about the effects of AI on content creators’ productivity and creative patterns in this emerging market. Our paper investigates the adoption impact of AI-generated voice – a generative AI technology creating acoustic artifacts – on video creators by empirically analyzing a unique dataset of 4,021 creators and their 428,918 videos on TikTok. Utilizing multiple audio and video analytics algorithms, we detect the adoption of AI voice from the massive video data and generate rich measurements for each video to quantify its characteristics. We then estimate the effects of AI voice using a difference-in-differences model coupled with look-ahead propensity score matching. Our results suggest that the adoption of AI voice increases creators’ video production and that it induces creators to produce shorter videos with more negative words. Interestingly, creators produce more novel videos with less self-disclosure when using AI voice. We also find that AI-voice videos received less viewer engagement unintendedly. Our paper provides the first empirical evidence of how generative AI reshapes video content creation on online platforms, which provides important implications for creators, platforms, and policymakers in the digital economy.

 

Mobile Resilience: The Effect of Mobile Device Management on Firm Performance during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Park, Jaecheol, Myunghwan Lee, Gene Moo Lee “Mobile Resilience: The Effect of Mobile Device Management on Firm Performance during the COVID-19 Pandemic”, Work-in-Progress.

  • Based on an industry collaboration

The use of mobile information technology (IT) has become increasingly vital for businesses, especially for remote and hybrid work during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing employees with accessibility, flexibility, and responsiveness. However, despite its growing significance, the business value of mobile device management and its role in establishing digital resilience during crises remain underexplored in the literature. To address this research gap, our study examines the effect of mobile device management on a firm’s resilience to external shocks. Using a proprietary dataset from a global mobile device management solution provider for public U.S. firms over the three-year period of 2019-2021, we find that firms with mobile device management have a better financial performance during the pandemic, demonstrating greater resilience to the shock. Furthermore, we observe heterogeneous resilience effects across industries, with greater impacts in non-high-tech industries than in high-tech ones, and in manufacturing, retail, and service industries compared to others. Our findings are robust to various tests. This study contributes to the literature by emphasizing the crucial role of mobile device management in building digital resilience.

Myunghwan Lee’s PhD Proposal: Three Essays on AI Strategies and Innovation

Myunghwan Lee (2023) “Three Essays on AI Strategies and Innovation”, Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal, University of British Columbia. https://sites.google.com/view/myunghwanlee/home

Supervisor: Gene Moo Lee

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, along with the explosive growth of digitized data, are transforming many industries and our society. While both academia and industry consider AI closely intertwined with innovation, we still have limited knowledge of the business and economic values of AI on innovation. This three-essay dissertation seeks to address this gap (i) by proposing a novel firm-level measure to identify strategically innovative firms; (ii) by examining how firm-level AI capabilities affect knowledge innovation; and (iii) by investigating the impact of robotics, embodied AI with a physical presence, on operational innovation.

In the first essay, we propose a novel firm-level measure, Strategic Competitive Positioning (SCP), to identify distinctive strategic positioning (i.e., first-movers, second-movers) and competition relationships. Drawing on network theory, we develop a structural hole-based, dynamic, and firm-specific SCP measure. Notably, this SCP measure is constructed using unsupervised machine-learning and network analytics approaches with minimal human intervention. Using a large dataset of 10-K annual reports from 13,476 public firms in the U.S., we demonstrate the value of the proposed measure by examining the impact of SCP on subsequent IPO performance.

In the second essay, we study the impact of firm-level AI capabilities on exploratory innovation to determine how AI’s value-creation process can facilitate knowledge innovation. Drawing on March and Simon (1958), we theorize how AI capabilities can help firms overcome bounded rationality and pursue exploratory innovation. We compiled a unique dataset consisting of 54,649 AI conference publications, 3 million patent filings, and 1.9 million inter-firm transactions to test the hypotheses. The findings show that a firm’s AI capabilities have a positive impact on exploratory innovation, and interestingly that conventional exploratory innovation-seeking approaches (e.g., traditional data management capabilities and inter-firm technology collaborations) negatively moderate the positive impact of AI capabilities on exploratory innovation.

The impact of AI technologies can be beyond knowledge innovation. Embodied AI technologies, specifically robotics, are driving operational innovation in manufacturing and service industries. While industrial robots designed for pre-defined tasks in controlled environments are extensively studied, little is known about the impact of AI-based service robots designed for customer-facing dynamic environments. In the third essay, we seek to examine how service robots can affect operational efficiency and service quality using the case of the hospitality industry. The preliminary results from a difference-in-differences model using a dataset of 4,610 restaurants in Singapore demonstrate that service robot adoption increases customer satisfaction, specifically through perceived service quality. To validate the initial result and further explore underlying mechanisms, we plan to collect additional datasets from different geographic areas and industries.

 

Go beyond the Local Search: Understanding the Impact of AI Capabilities on Exploratory Innovation

Myunghwan Lee, Gene Moo Lee, Cui, Victor. “Go beyond the Local Search: Understanding the Impact of AI Capabilities on Exploratory Innovation”, AOM 2023

Firms typically depend on technological assets or inter-firm relationships to pursue exploratory innovation. In this paper, we regard Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an exploratory innovation-seeking instrument by which AI may search unexplored resources and thereby broaden the boundary of a firm. Drawing on the theory of bounded rationality and organizational learning, we hypothesize the impact of a firm’s AI capabilities on exploratory innovation and how AI influences traditional boundary-expanding activities. Our empirical investigations, using a novel AI capabilities measure constructed with AI conference and patent datasets, show that AI capabilities have positive impacts on exploratory innovation. In addition, the results show that extant technological assets (i.e., traditional data management capabilities) and ongoing inter-firm relationships (i.e., inter-firm technology collaboration) remedy the constraints on a firm’s innovation-seeking behaviors and that these boundary-expanding activities negatively moderate the positive impact of AI capabilities on exploratory innovation. Our key takeaway is that we investigate how AI affects exploratory innovation using our newly developed AI capability measure, contributing to the body of knowledge on exploratory innovation literature.

How Does AI-Generated Voice Affect Online Content Creation? Evidence from TikTok

Zhang, Xiaoke, Mi Zhou, Gene Moo Lee (2022) “How Does AI-Generated Voice Affect Online Content Creation? Evidence from TikTok”, Preparing for resubmission to Management Science.

  • Presentations: INFORMS DS (2022), UBC (2022), WITS (2022), ISMS MKSC (2023), CSWIM (2023), KrAIS Summer (2023), CIST (2023)
  • API sponsored by Ensemble Data

The rising demand for online video content has fostered one of the fastest-growing markets as evidenced by the popularity of platforms like TikTok. Because video content is often difficult to create, platforms have attempted to leverage recent advancements of artificial intelligence (AI) to help creators with their video creation process. However, surprisingly little is known about the effects of AI on content creators’ productivity and creative patterns in this emerging market. Our paper investigates the adoption impact of AI-generated voice – a generative AI technology creating acoustic artifacts – on video creators by empirically analyzing a unique dataset of 4,021 creators and their 428,918 videos on TikTok. Utilizing multiple audio and video analytics algorithms, we detect the adoption of AI voice from the massive video data and generate rich measurements for each video to quantify its characteristics. We then estimate the effects of AI voice using a difference-in-differences model coupled with look-ahead propensity score matching. Our results suggest that the adoption of AI voice increases creators’ video production and that it induces creators to produce shorter videos with more negative words. Interestingly, creators produce more novel videos with less self-disclosure when using AI voice. We also find that AI-voice videos received less viewer engagement unintendedly. Our paper provides the first empirical evidence of how generative AI reshapes video content creation on online platforms, which provides important implications for creators, platforms, and policymakers in the digital economy.

Ideas are Easy but Execution is Everything: Measuring the Impact of Stated AI Strategies and Capability on Firm Innovation Performance

Lee, Myunghwan, Gene Moo Lee (2022) “Ideas are Easy but Execution is Everything: Measuring the Impact of Stated AI Strategies and Capability on Firm Innovation Performance”, Work-in-Progress.

Contrary to the promise that AI will transform various industries, there are conflicting views on the impact of AI on firm performance. We argue that existing AI capability measures have two major limitations, limiting our understanding of the impact of AI in business. First, existing measures on AI capability do not distinguish between stated strategies and actual AI implementations. To distinguish stated AI strategy and actual AI capability, we collect various AI-related data sources, including AI conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR), patent filings (USPTO), inter-firm transactions related to AI adoption (FactSet), and AI strategies stated in 10-K annual reports. Second, while prior studies identified successful AI implementation factors (e.g., data integrity and intelligence augmentation) in a general context, little is known about the relationship between AI capabilities and in-depth innovation performance. We draw on the neo-institutional theory to articulate the firm-level AI strategies and construct a fine-grained AI capability measure that captures the unique characteristics of AI-strategy. Using our newly proposed AI capability measure and a novel dataset, we will study the impact of AI on firm innovation, contributing to the nascent literature on managing AI.

Learning Faces to Predict Matching Probability in an Online Dating Market (ICIS 2022)

Kwon, Soonjae, Sung-Hyuk Park, Gene Moo Lee, Dongwon Lee. “Learning Faces to Predict Matching Probability in an Online Dating Market”. In Proceedings of International Conference on Information Systems 2022.

  • Presentations: DS (2021), AIMLBA (2021), WITS (2021), ICIS (2022)
  • Preliminary version in ICIS 2022 Proceedings
  • Based on an industry collaboration

With the increasing use of online matching platforms, predicting matching probability between users is crucial for efficient market design. Although previous studies have constructed various visual features to predict matching probability, facial features, which are important in online matching, have not been widely used. We find that deep learning-enabled facial features can significantly enhance the prediction accuracy of a user’s partner preferences from the individual rating prediction analysis in an online dating market. We also build prediction models for each gender and use prior theories to explain different contributing factors of the models. Furthermore, we propose a novel method to visually interpret facial features using the generative adversarial network (GAN). Our work contributes to the literature by providing a framework to develop and interpret facial features to investigate underlying mechanisms in online matching markets. Moreover, matching platforms can predict matching probability more accurately for better market design and recommender systems.

My thoughts on AI, Big Data, and IS Research

Last update: June 10th, 2021

Recently, I had a chance to share my thoughts on how Big Data Analytics and AI will impact Information Systems (IS) research. Thanks to ever-growing datasets (public and proprietary) and powerful computational resources (cloud API, open-source projects), AI and Big Data will be important in IS research in the foreseeable future. If you are an aspiring IS researcher, I believe that you should be able to embrace this and take advantage of this.

First, AI and Big Data are powerful “tools” for IS research. It could be intimidating to see all the fancy new AI techniques. But they are just tools to analyze your data. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to use them. There are many open-source projects in Python and R that you can use to analyze your data. Also, many cloud services (e.g., Amazon Rekognition, Google Cloud ML, Microsoft Azure ML) allow you to use pre-trained AI models at a modest cost (that your professors can afford). What you need is some working knowledge in programming languages like Python and R. And a high-level understanding of the idea behind algorithms.

Don’t shy away from hands-on programming. Using AI and Big Data tools may not be a competitive advantage in the long run because of the democratization of AI tools. However, I believe it will be the new baseline. So you need to have it in your research toolbox. Specifically, I believe that IS researchers should have a working knowledge of Python/R programming and Linux environment. I recommend these online courses: Data Science, Machine Learning, Linux, SQL, and NoSQL.

Second, AI and Big Data Analytics are creating a lot of interesting new “phenomenon” in personal lives, firms, and societies. How AI and robots will be adopted in the workplace and how that will affect the labor market? Are we losing our jobs? Or can we improve our productivity with AI tools? How AI will be used in professional services by the experts? What are the unintended consequences (such as biases, security, privacy, misinformation) of AI adoptions in the organization and society? And how can we mitigate such issues? There are so many new and interesting research questions.

In order to conduct relevant research, I think that IS researchers should closely follow the emerging technologies. Again, it could be hard to keep up with all the advances. I try to keep up to date by reading industry reports (from McKinsey and Deloitte) and listening to many podcasts (e.g., Freakonomics Radio, a16 Podcasts by Andreessen Horowitz, Lex Fridman Podcast, Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, HBR’s Exponential View by Azeem Azhar).

I hope this post may help new IS researchers shape their research strategies. I will try to keep updating this post. Cheers!

 

 

Trustworthy Face? The Effect and Drivers of Comprehensive Trust in Online Job Market Platform

Kwon, Jun Bum, Donghyuk Shin, Gene Moo Lee, Jake An, Sam Hwang (2020) “Trustworthy Face? The Effect and Drivers of Comprehensive Trust in Online Job Market Platform”. Work-in-progress.

The abstract will appear here.