Research
"The purpose of an IS discipline is to study how people are affected by and can make use of the wide range of information and communication technologies in all their activities: including their commercial, scientific, personal, social, creative and political lives."
-by Mike Cushman, from AISWorld Mailing List
As it said in this quote, I am always interested in how the information and communication technologies can affect people and how to make good use of them. These technologies, especially, the Internet and web technologies as well as their relationship with people, organizations and business attract me most.
My current research interest lies on the economics of the Internet, especially, the economics of the user generated content (UGC) online. This is a quite active area recently, which poses many deep and fascinating questions. For example, what is the economic value of UGC? How can we measure it? How can firms deal with these contents? These are only a few among the set of questions that need research, and these questions represent exciting research opportunities.
I am also interested in other research topics such as adoption and diffusion of information innovations, e-commerce, economics of open source software, etc.
Publication
Ye, Q., B. Gu, W. Chen, and R. Law. 2008. Measuring the Value of Managerial Responses to Online Reviews - A Natural Experiment of Two Online Travel Agencies. Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2008)
Feng, X., W. Chen, and Y. Feng. 2007. Wiki-based Knowledge Management in Small and Medium Projects. Proceedings of the International Conference on Construction and Real Estate Management
Chen, W. 2006. Chinese Search Engine Comparing Research. Management Science in China, (Special Issue), 47-51. (in Chinese)
Working Paper
Ye, Q., R. Law, B. Gu and W. Chen. 2008. The Impact of Online User-Generated Reviews on Business Performance in the Hotel Industry
Law, R., Q. Ye, W. Chan, and R. Leung. 2008. An Analysis of the most influential articles published in tourism journals from 2000 to 2007: A Google Scholar approach
Academic Experience
Dec. 2007 - May 2008 & Sep. 2008 - Present: Research Assistant in HK PolyU
I am working with Dr. Rob Law in several projects, assisting the team in data collection, analysis and paper writing. These projects include but are not limit to:
UGC in Tourism and Hospitality: We are inspecting the impact of online customer reviews in H&T, especially in the hotel industry. We found that the impacts of reviews on sales are different in well-known and lesser-known hotels. The effects are stronger for unknown hotels.
Tourism Demand Forecasting with AI methods: In this project, we forecast the tourism demand with AI methods such as Neural Network and Support Vector Machine, and compare the results with those of econometric methods. My knowledge about these two technologies was renewed with reading and experiments with Weka - an open source data mining package.
Hospitality and Tourism (H&T) Journal Quality Evaluation: I am collecting the information of articles and citations from several different sources, such as Google Scholar, EbscoHost, ScienceDirect, and Scopus to evaluating the quality and popularity of prestigious H&T journals.
Aug. 2007 - Present: Online Customer Reviews Research
This was the topic of my master thesis. I investigated the relationship between characteristics of online reviews (such as rating, review text sentimental polarity, etc.) and the sales of products. The relationships between these characteristics and the usefulness of reviews were also explored. I found that the managerial responses to online reviews have a significant impact on hotel bookings online. As far as I know, no literatures have found this before. I also found that the effects of reviews are stronger for lesser-known hotels, which confirms the experiment result by Vermeulen and Seegers (2008), which found that online hotel reviews influence travelers’ attitude more for lesser-known hotels than for well-known hotels. I am still working in this direction.
May. 2007 - Jun. 2007: Teaching Assistant of Distributed System Principles
I worked as a teaching assistant of the course "Introduction to Distributed Systems". I designed and taught eight experiment courses during 5 weeks, technologies such as Java Remoting, XML, Ruby on rails, web service etc. were taught. A website was built at the same time to communicate with the students. You can find the mirror of the course website here.
Mar. 2007 - May. 2007: Wiki and Knowledge Management
I got this idea from my experience in IBM Club, where we have been using Wiki for project and knowledge management since 2005. In this paper, we suggested a Wiki-based solution of knowledge management for small and medium projects. The club was studied using a case study method.
2006: Search Engine Comparing Research
I compared most popular Chinese search engines using an economical model. Data were collected through an online survey and a lab experiment.