Reporter: Associate Professor Qiu Liangfei, University of Florida, USA

Time: 9:30-11:00 am, November 18, 2022

Conference No.: Tencent Conference 550-433-080

Content introduction:

Social trading platforms are growing rapidly in the digital economy.We investigate how changes in social attention,operationalized as the number of followers,affect traders’ performance and trading behaviors through a randomized field experiment on a leading cryptocurrency social trading platform.We find that traders who receive more social attention tend to trade more,use higher leverage, and achieve worse performance.The negative effects are stronger among traders who performed well prior to the increase in attention,consistent with our proposed mechanism of overconfidence.We also find a reference point effect of social attention in our context:the removal of the social attention that a trader has ready received does not reverse the effects of increased attention-instead, it leads to even worse performance.The negative effects are stronger among traders who performed poorly prior to the loss of attention, which supports our hypothesis about social attention as a reference point.Our study offers important implications for the desigen of social trading platforms and reminds traders and platform managers to pay closer attention to the interaction between social attention and trading decisions.

Brief introduction of the reporter:

Qiu Liangfei is an associate professor of the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management at the University of Florida's Warrington School of Business. In 2014, he received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. His current research focuses on forecasting markets, social networks and social media platforms, telecommunications networks and information systems economics. Many of his research results have been published in well-known academic journals, such as Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Decision Support Systems. He won the Sandy Slaughter Early Career Award of the INFORMS Information Systems Association and the AIS Early Career Award in 2019. His academic part-time jobs include: deputy editor of MIS Quarterly Editorial Committee, senior editor of Production and Operations Management, and deputy editor of Decision Support Systems.

(Undertaken by: Department of Management Engineering, Scientific Research and Academic Exchange Center)