时间：7月4日（周三）上午10:00-11:30

　　地点：主楼317会议室

　　报告内容摘要：

　　Augmented reality (AR) game Pokémon GO, as the most popular mobile game in 2016, not only promoted people’s physical activities, but also expanded their mobility areas. The game connects the virtual game world with PokéStops in real locations, where players tend to hang around. Managers of the restaurants near PokéStops have taken advantage of this popular game and used it as a new marketing tool to attract customers. However, the windfall is not always there. Thus, it is imperative to examine the effectiveness of the AR game as a marketing tool. The objective of this paper is to study how Pokémon GO impacts local restaurants’ reputation on the popular restaurant review website Yelp.com. We use a difference-in-difference (DID) approach to investigate the change of restaurants’ online reputation before and after the launch of Pokémon GO between the restaurants with and without PokéStops nearby. We also compare the short term and long term impacts of the launch of Pokémon GO on restaurants’ online reputation. We find that in general, restaurants with PokéStops nearby do benefit from Pokémon GO in improving their online reputation, however, the effectiveness depends on the restaurant types, the reputation metrics, and the time frames. More specifically, Pokémon GO improves the online reputation of the low-rating restaurants with PokéStops nearby, but only for the short term. Most results demonstrate a rich-get-richer effect of Pokémon GO on restaurants’ reputation. That is, the positive effect only favors for restaurants that well prepared their online reputation. More specifically, only restaurants with high rating can reap the benefits from Pokémon GO in the long term. This paper provides empirical evidence for the effectiveness of AR games as a marketing tool and sheds light on how to use AR technologies to improve online reputation.

　　报告人简介：

　　Dr. Jie Zhang is Professor from the Department of Information Systems and Operation Management, the University of Texas at Arlington. She received her doctoral degree in Computer Information Systems from the Simon School of Business Administration, University of Rochester. Her research covers a wide spectrum of areas, including channel management, information goods, electronic commerce, social media, etc. She was awarded Outstanding Research Award in University of Texas at Arlington and University of Toledo, and Best Research Paper Award at the HICSS conference. Her research papers were published at top academic journals including MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Economics and Management Strategies, Communications of the ACM, Decision Support System, etc。

（承办：管理工程系、科研与学术交流中心）