報告人：香港中文大學 李鴻飛 助理教授
時間：2021年7月7日（周三）上午 10:00-11:30
地點：主樓216
報告內容簡介：
The emergence of online platforms for professional services (e.g., cosmetic procedures) represents a natural progression of e-commerce from search and experience goods to credence goods. Due to the deeply consequential nature of professional services and the large information asymmetries between customers and service providers, designing effective risk-reduction strategies are crucial for facilitating digital transactions of professional services. In this paper, we study whether and how the introduction of a novel risk-reduction strategy, the add-on insurance covering the potential cost of negative consequences (e.g., complications and unsatisfactory outcomes), affects the demand for professional services in online platforms. In doing so, we leverage a natural experiment on an online platform for cosmetic procedures, which started to offer the add-on insurance for a subset of cosmetic procedures in 2016. Our empirical study shows that this risk-reduction strategy has asymmetric effects on low- and high- risk procedures. Specifically, the introduction of insurance increases the sales of low-risk procedures, but not that of high-risk ones. More importantly, the insurance has a negative spillover effect on uninsured competitors of insured procedures, regardless of their risk levels. The negative spillover effect of insurance on high-risk procedures is noteworthy because it hurts the sales of their uninsured competitors without increasing their own sales, suggesting that the insurance can decrease the overall demand for high-risk procedures. We further investigate the mechanisms behind the asymmetric treatment effects and the negative spillover effect beyond demand cannibalization using an online controlled experiment. Our findings have important implications for platforms to design, deploy, and evaluate their risk-reduction strategies.
報告人簡介：
李鴻飛，香港中文大學決策科學與經濟管理系助理教授，于美國康涅狄格大學獲管理學博士學位。研究領域包括新興在線平臺中的商業分析、人工智能應用和統計方法等。目前在ACM Transaction in MIS發表了一篇文章，并有多篇文章在Information Systems Research、Marketing Science、MIS Quarterly等頂級期刊在審。他擅長講授數學、統計學、計量經濟學和計算機語言相關的技術類課程，例如商業分析、網絡分析、數據科學、機器學習等。
（承辦：管理工程系、科研與學術交流中心）
