Essays on knowledge sharing and learning

Abstract

Knowledge sharing is an activity through which information, skills, or expertise is disseminated, reconstructed, and internalized among people, friends, families, communities or organizations. It is an indispensable element of the booming sharing economy and e-commerce where interactions between individuals are unprecedentedly intensive. To coordinate and promote knowledge sharing, it is important to investigate the fundamental aspects appertaining to this activity, including motivations for sharing knowledge, the optimal format of information delivery (i.e., what information and how much to provide to which recipients), the efficiency of sharing, intended recipients, and learning processes. Among these aspects, my thesis mainly focuses on two areas namely, motivations for knowledge sharing, and optimal information provision format. In the first part, we investigate the knowledge sharing motivations among competing smallholders. In developing economies, smallholders apply their own specialized knowledge as well as exert costly effort in managing their farms. To raise overall productivity, NGOs and governments are advocating various knowledge sharing and learning platforms so that farmers can exchange a variety of farming techniques. Putting altruism aside, we examine the overall economic implications for heterogeneous farmers to share their private knowledge voluntarily with others under (implicit) competition. By analyzing a multi-person sequential game, we provide a plausible reason to explain why (and conditions under which) knowledge sharing can be beneficial even when each farmer’s profit depends on the total output. We find that the voluntary shared level is always lower than or equal to the “efficient” shared level which maximizes farmer welfare under coordination. This finding is motivational in developing a reward mechanism to entice farmers to elevate their knowledge shared level in a decentralized system so as to maximize farmer welfare. Upon reviewing different mechanisms, we establish a quota-based reward mechanism that can entice farmers to share knowledge voluntarily up to the efficient shared level. In the second part, we examine the impact of information provision policy on a firm’s profitability. Companies often post user-generated reviews online to facilitate social learning, so that consumers can learn from existing customers about the quality of an experience good before purchasing. We evaluate two potential user-generated review provision policies for a company that sells an experience good in two heterogeneous regions over two periods. The first policy is called the Association-based policy under which a consumer who belongs to a region can only observe the aggregate review (i.e., average rating) generated by customers from the same region. The second one is called the Global-based policy under which each consumer is presented with the aggregate review generated by all of the users in both regions. We find that, regardless of the provision format, posting customer-generated reviews is beneficial to the firm. Also, we demonstrate that the Global-based policy dominates the Association-based policy when (a) the product quality is highly uncertain; or (b) the two regions are fairly similar (in terms of variability in the product ratings). Moreover, we propose a third more beneficial provision policy that imparts more product information to consumers than either the Association-based or the Global-based policy alone.

Date of Award	2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology