[Mingli Lecture Hall, 2021 Issue 4] Associate Professor Huang Ni, Bauer School of Business, University of Houston: Preserving User Privacy Through Ephemeral Sharing Design: A Large-Scale Randomized Field Experiment in the Online Dating Context

Time: January 11th (Monday) at 10:00 am-11:30 am

Tencent meeting number: 685 819 848

Reporter: Associate Professor Huang Ni, Bauer Business School, University of Houston

Speaker profile:

Huang Ni is currently an associate professor and a Bauer researcher at the Bauer School of Business at the University of Houston. Professor Huang graduated from the Department of Management Science at the Fox School of Business, Temple University, USA in 2017, and received a doctorate in management science. In the same year, he entered the Carey School of Business at Arizona State University as an assistant professor in the Department of Information Management. In 2020, he joined the C.T.Bauer School of Business of the University of Houston and was hired as an associate professor and was awarded the title of tenured professor at the same time.

Professor Huang's research areas include digital platforms, online education, online healthcare, machine learning applications, artificial intelligence business applications, social media and e-commerce.

Professor Huang currently serves as the associate editor of MIS Quarterly, a top academic journal of the international information system.Professor Huang's research has been published in numerous top international academic journals such as 《Management Science》, 《Information Systems Research》, 《MIS Quarterly》, 《Journal of Management Information Systems》, 《Journal of the Association for Information Systems》, 《Journal of Consumer Psychology》.Professor Huang is an academic and corporate advisor to multiple technology startups and top 500 businesses such as Tencent eSports Department, Alibaba Damore Institute, Magkin Technology, Summer Social, School Online, and U. S. e-commerce company Collage.com et al.

Report Content Summary:

Communication cold-start problems are pervasive in privacy-sensitive settings. For example, due to privacy concerns, users of online dating platforms often refrain from voluntary sharing of sensitive personal information in the initial interaction stage. However, the lack of information sharing impedes trust building, further hurting their probability of securing matches in online dating due to information asymmetry. Considering the privacy-authenticity dilemma and the communication cold-start problem, we examined ephemeral sharing as a privacy-preserving mechanism to navigate the balance between users’privacy concerns and information sharing in the initial interaction stages in online dating. Ephemeral sharing refers to the digital design that once the information being shared by a sender is disclosed to a receiver for a relatively short period, it will be invisible and non-retrievable to the receiver in the future. In partnership with Summer, an online dating platform, we report a large-scale randomized field experiment with over 70k users to understand how ephemeral sharing influences users’information sharing behavior and their subsequent matching outcomes.

(Organized by: Department of Management Engineering, Scientific Research and Academic Exchange Center)