Enriching the PhD experience

‘Pay-what-you-want’ (PWYW) pricing has received increasing attention and seems to be a nascent trend in recent years. It has been applied to a wide range of businesses from entertainment to food. Since PWYW gives full control over the price to the customers, the framing of PWYW offerings is expected to largely affect the proportion of value customers are willing to give away to the company. Essi Poyry, a doctoral student from Aalto University in Finland, conducted an experiment in the context of new product pricing for online games. She studied how framing reference prices, promotion availability and payment anonymity influence consumers’ willingness to pay. The research results suggest that companies should explore customers’ price ceilings with PWYW under different decision frames when pricing new products. They also point out that companies should increase their reference prices and public perceptions about how to raise the prices customers choose to pay under the PWYW pricing mechanism.

Best Doctoral Research Paper Pricing New Products with Pay-What-You-Want Essi Poyry Alta University

This paper, entitled ‘Pricing New Products with Pay-What-You-Want, received the ‘Best Doctoral Research Contribution’ at the 2013 Workshop on Analytics for Business, Consumer and Social Insights (BCSI) held on 3-5 August 2013 at SMU. Essy Poyry’s work demonstrated originality in the research and excellent research methodology.

Initiated in 2012, the Workshop is a venue for interdisciplinary research presentations and postgraduate research tutorials, in SMU’s Area of Excellence, Analytics for Business, Consumer and Social Insights. This year’s set of interdisciplinary data analytics tutorials focused on new methods and research innovations for doctoral students and faculty. Participants heard tutorials on data mining techniques and data privacy issues, Bayesian statistics for data analytics, and data mining of image and video data.

The BCSI Workshop provides several benefits for postgraduate research students in attendance. This workshop helps these students by providing a friendly environment for peer learning and an opportunity to network with academic faculty to widen and strengthen professional relationships. The gathering of different groups helps students to understand and develop knowledge about how to address different problems in their research during their PhD study and after their graduation. Making a research presentation at BCSI also allows postgraduate students to gain some awareness of skills that will to be developed for the successful communication of their research findings.

What students have to say about the BCSI workshop:

“Being invited to attend and present at BCSI 2013 as a first-year PhD student was such an eye-opener to me. I had a chance to discuss my research outcomes and directions with internationally-renowned professors, and I solicited many useful comments. On top of that, the event was an excellent venue for me to network with and learn from other peer PhD students from across disciplines – and from as far as Finland. All in all, it has bootstrapped me into my research agenda, and that has certainly put me at a great advantage as a junior PhD student,” shared Le Truc Viet. He is a PhD student from SMU’s School of Information Systems, who presented his research topic “GDAT: Analyzing Group Decision-Making Behaviors from Trajectories”.

Martin Yu, a Research Fellow at the SMU School of Information Systems shared his experience from the recent BCSI event also. “The three-day BCSI Workshop promotes high quality research, and the event this year allowed me to get access to top researchers in my field. After I made my presentation about my recent group buying study, I received valuable feedback from experienced researchers that I found useful to help improve my research and turn my conference paper into a journal-level article. Also, by networking, I was able to become acquainted with top researchers from both the Information Systems field and other areas.”

“This platform has also opened my eyes to ‘big data’ analytics. Big data analytics is not a small circle issue, so if you want to make some breakthroughs, you have to know somebody in other fields. I feel grateful that the BCSI organisers invited thought leaders and methods specialists on big data analytics to the Workshop. These included statistics researchers, data scientists and econometricians from leading consulting firms, and industry leaders from the banking industry,” he added.

Best Faculty Research Snippet

Marginal Deterrence in the Enforcement of Law: Evidence from Distributed Denial of Service Attack HUI Kai-Lung Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

By studying a panel dataset of distributed denial of service attacks across 240 countries over 5 years, Professor Hui and his team found that enforcing the Convention on Cybercrime increased the intensity of attack by 43 to 52 percent. It did not significantly reduce the chance for a country to be selected for the attacks though. Professor Hui and his team also conducted a battery of identification and falsification tests to show that such increased attack intensity arose because of failure in marginal deterrence. They favoured this explanation over other theories, such as brutalisation, stigmatisation, or defiance, or other simultaneous effects. The research also showed that raising the standard of proof of conviction is one way to facilitate marginal deterrence, but it has the undesirable effect of raising the offense rate.

Professor Hui was commended for his high quality of research work that yielded deep and interesting insights through the analysis of different ways to suppress cyber crimes with law enforcement.

Doctoral Research Snippets

A Pricing Model for Cloud Computing Services Huang Jianhui, SMU PhD student in Information Systems Jianhui’s research analyses the potential benefits brought about by introducing spot-priced service to a market in which spot-priced and fixed-price reserved-capacity services co-exist. Using spot-priced services bears the risk of the services being terminated by provider, while reserved services are interruption-free. The research findings show that offering spot-priced services in addition to reserved services will reduce a vendor’s profit and market share of reserved services. Profit from spot-priced services will compensate with new profits, though there may be losses under certain conditions. Offering spot-priced and fixed-prices services in the  market is likely to achieve the highest social welfare. View presentation slides   Technology Investment Decision-Making under Uncertainty for Mobile Payments Liu Jun, SMU PhD student in Information Systems Liu Jun’s research explores a bank’s mobile payment system adoption decision at the firm level when it faces technological risks and uncertain market conditions. His research results to date show the potential benefits of a new modeling perspective and how financial economics theory can support mobile payments decision-making. His modeling approach is intended to help senior managers estimate the appropriate timing for investment, and the payoffs from mobile payments that are likely to arise. An interesting innovation in the research is the use of a ‘jump diffusion’ process to model the dynamically changing value of the underlying IT investment, which acts like an infrastructure to support future development. View presentation slides   Using Social Correlation in Latent Spaces for Recommendations Freddy Chua, SMU PhD in Information Systems Users face many choices on the web when it comes to choosing which product to buy, which video to watch, and so on. In making adoption decisions, users rely not only on their own preferences, but also on friends. This research offers a framework that considers a social correlation matrix representing the degrees of correlation from every user to the user’s friends, in addition to a set of latent factor representing topics of interests of individual users.  View presentation slides