Date of Award

8-2021

Document Type

Campus Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Business Administration

First Advisor

Roger Blake

Second Advisor

Ehsan Elahi

Third Advisor

Josephine Namayanja

Abstract

This dissertation studies human behaviors and the decision-making process under supply chain competitions and social interactions in e-commerce. Four separate papers comprise this study. The first paper aims to answer the question of how competition parameters affect the decisions of the suppliers who are competing to win the business of a buyer. The observed decisions in the outsourcing competition experiments are modeled and explained through different behavioral factors including a new proposed factor, rival-chasing. The second paper focuses more on the competitive behavior of the suppliers and proposes a new form of equilibrium, gamesmanship equilibrium. Gamesmanship equilibrium, in contrast to the profit maximization assumption of Nash equilibrium, assumes the goal of decision-makers is defeating their competitors and maximizing the payoff difference in their own favor. This study mathematically models this equilibrium and examines how well it fares in explaining the observed behaviors. The third paper develops an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and a recurrent neural network (RNN) algorithm to analyze the time series of the subjects’ decisions in the first two papers. This study enhances the prediction accuracy of the models by incorporating the behavioral factors proposed in the first two papers into them. The fourth paper develops new models to improve the performance of the existing models on explaining and predicting online review helpfulness by extracting new features through text mining techniques and natural language processing (NLP), then, uses data from Amazon.com to empirically test the models. This dissertation covers the problem setup, theoretical and empirical results, proposed models, and discussion of findings and their significance.

Comments

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