Time: 29 November (Monday) 9:30am-11:30am
Tencent Conference Number: 211 160 268
Rapporteur Bio.
Yili Hong is currently the C. T. Bauer Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Digital Society at the University of Houston, USA, and Director of the PhD program in the School of Business. Prof. Hong graduated from the Department of Management Science, Fox School of Business, Temple University, USA with a PhD in Management Information Systems in 2014. Professor Hong was promoted to Associate Professor (tenured) at Arizona State University Carey School of Business in 2018. He joined the C. T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston as a full professor (tenured) in 2020.
Professor Hong's research interests include Internet finance, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, sharing economy, digital platforms, digital economy, online social media, and Internet user behavior. Professor Hong is currently a senior editor of Production and Operations Management (POM), a leading international academic journal in business, and an associate editor of the Journal of Information Systems Research (ISR) and the Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS). Professor Hong's research has won best paper awards at major international conferences. Professor Hong's dissertation also won 2 best doctoral thesis awards in the field of information systems in 2014. Professor Hong's research has been published in many internationally renowned academic journals such as Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Production and Operations Management, INFORMS Journal on Computing and many other internationally renowned academic journals. Professor Hong's PhD students and postdocs are now working in major universities in the US and Asia, such as University of Wisconsin-Madison, Tulane University, University of Connecticut, University of Massachusetts, University of Houston, Renmin University of China and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. Professor Hong is an academic and corporate advisor to many technology start-ups and Fortune 500 companies, such as Alibaba Dharma Institute, Mackin Technology, Summer Social, Lyft in the US, Freelancer in Australia, Fits.me in Japan, Yami.com in the US, and Picmonic in the US.
Summary of the report.
Online platforms for synchronized content, such as live streaming, have gained considerable popularity most recently. These platforms involve engaging a large number of users and facilitate their interactions in a real-time setting. One key difference between asynchronous platforms (e.g., Reddit, Wikipedia) and synchronous platforms (e.g., Twitch, Youtube Live) is the real-time interactivity. As group size increases, real-time interactivity scales rapidly, making the engagement interface erratic and fast-paced. While the existing literature finds that the group size of peers has a positive effect on user engagement on asynchronous platforms, how group size affects synchronous interactions, particularly with the presence of bot and human moderators, is unclear. In this work, we leverage exogenous increases in live streaming viewers (from the Raid function in Twitch), to empirically examine how group size affects viewers’ real-time engagement and how moderators affect this relationship. Collecting and analyzing entire chat histories of 8,396 playbacks on Twitch, our results suggest that a) the live streaming channel generally engages more viewers after group size increases; b) however, existing viewers (users are already in the live streaming channel before the Raid) tend to engage less after the increases in group size; c) there are more diverse topics covered in the chat room after group size increases; and d) live streaming channels adopting bot moderators can better sustain viewer engagement after group size increases while human moderator can better organize the chat content. The findings in this paper indicate a congestion effect of increasing group size viewer engagement in the synchronous communication setting and suggest the beneficial role of content moderators, which extends the prior literature on user engagement in online platforms.
(Organised by: Department of Management Engineering, Centre for Research and Academic Communication)
