In this study, we estimate the effect of "online following," a basic form of online social interaction, on members' contributions in open source software (OSS) communities, using a unique longitudinal data set containing information on over 4 million OSS developers and their social interactions over 7 years. We find that obtaining new followers in the previous month has a significant positive effect on developers' level of contribution in the current month. The effect carries over to the next month although the marginal effect decreases. We further find that the effect of new followers on their contribution level is much stronger for freelancers than those with company affiliation. In contrast to the previous literature that posited the existence of non-monetary incentives for developers who contribute to the OSS communities, our result suggests the existence of incentives that are tied to future monetary rewards for developers on these platforms. Our findings have important implications for the OSS platforms as well as the OSS community. OSS platform designers may consult our results to learn about the social features that affect members' contribution. We also encourage OSS community to use the "following" feature more prominently on OSS platforms to incentivize higher contribution levels to the projects.

To my family, teachers and friends. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervising professor Dr. Donggang Liu for constantly motivating and encouraging me, for his great patience of explaining the same problem to me again and again, and also for his invaluable advice on not only study and research but also how to change the role from a student to a researcher. I wish to thank Dr. Matthew Wright for his encouragement and valuable comments and suggestions to my presentations, and for those illuminative talks he had with me about the problems I came up with. I wish also to thank Dr. Yonghe Liu for his interest in my research and for taking time to serve in my defense committee.

With the development of data-intensive internet services, the world has witnessed explosive growth in mobile data consumption during the last couple of years. The upcoming generation of 5G-capable phones and networks will continue and even accelerate that process. At the same time, consumers are becoming more conscious about their data consumption because their monthly caps of mobile data plans can be easily exhausted by premium content, such as high-definition videos and virtual-reality games. In response, the mobile network operators (MNOs) have proposed a new business model, the so-called sponsored data plans, to subsidize consumers by transferring at least part of the data bills from consumers to content providers. Although industry practitioners claim that sponsored data plans increase consumer welfare, our analysis reveals that the impact of sponsored data on consumer surplus depends crucially on whether the MNO has complete information of the consumers’ valuation of mobile data. Our analysis helps provide a clearer picture of the impact of sponsored data on consumer surplus while reconciling the conflicting views from scholars, digital rights groups, and the network carriers.

面向数据排名的可视分析方法综述周志光 1,2) , 程奥圣 1) , 朱申吉 1) , 李国俊 1) , 梅晓蔚 1)* 1) (浙江财经大学信息管理与人工智能学院 杭州 310018) 2) (浙江大学 CAD&CG 国家重点实验室 杭州 310058)