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Many platforms use monetary incentives to stimulate consumers who have authentic consumption experiences to contribute to online reviews. However, the monetary incentive is problematic partly because consumers prefer and trust organic reviews over incentivized reviews. To increase transparency, platforms use a monetary incentive disclosure label ahead of reviews to indicate the review source. However, this monetary incentive disclosure label may have unintended effect on review length.

In this study, we are going to investigate how monetary incentive disclosure label and review length affects the review helpfulness. We design a 2 (monetary incentive: no incentive vs. with incentive and label) between-subject experiment ✖2 (review length: long vs. short) within-subject experiment.

We will conduct an experiment on a public account called marketing research group on the Chinese social platform WeChat. This platform allows Chinese scholars to post questionnaires on it, and subjects on this platform can participate in the survey. Our experiment is to study the impact of the default system on consumer ratings. default system provides a pre-selected rating for consumers when they enter the rating system and then it allows consumers to revise the default value. Some digital platforms, eg Qunar.com and che168.com, introduced an interesting default design in the multi-dimensional rating system. This default design is more “libertarian” but less “paternalistic”. Specifically, consumers submit overall ratings autonomously first and the system then pops up default attribute ratings that have the same ratings as the overall ratings. The user can modify the default ARs as they wish, or remove some attributes if they do not want to review some of the attributes. In this survey, we will test the impact of the default system on consumer ratings in an experimental environment. During the Chinese New Year, many movies were shown, which provided us with a large number of subjects with actual consumption experience. We invite these participants to choose a movie to rate.

This study aims to find out how default design affect consumers rating behavior. At the same time, this study investigates the eye tracking feature of consumers responding to the default rating system.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic spread to the UK in early 2020 with the first few cases being identified in late January. A rapid increase in confirmed cases started in March, and the number of infected people is however unknown, largely due to the rather limited testing scale. A number of reports published so far reveal that the COVID-19 has long incubation period, high fatality ratio and non-specific symptoms, making this novel coronavirus far different from common seasonal influenza. In this note, we present a modified SEIR model which takes into account the time lag effect and probability distribution of model states. Based on the proposed model, it is estimated that the actual total number of infected people by 1 April in the UK might have already exceeded 610,000. Average fatality rates under different assumptions at the beginning of April 2020 are also estimated. Our model also reveals that the R0 value is between 7.5–9 which is much larger than most of the previously reported values. The proposed model has a potential to be used for assessing future epidemic situations under different intervention strategies.

In summer maize growth period, the water supply and demand ratio is regarded as the evaluation index of drought and waterlogging for the summer maize in Liaocheng City. Using GIS, statistics, agrometeorology and other methods, we analyze the precipitation during the summer maize growth period in Luxi Plains from 1961 to 2011. Through the calculation of drought and waterlogging index, it indicates that the disasters of drought and waterlogging frequently occur during the summer maize growth period, mainly affected by the drought; the frequency of occurrence of drought accounts for 80.4%, that is, it is very prone to serious drought phenomenon, seriously affecting the normal growth and development of summer maize during the seedling period. With global warming, the industrial and domestic water demand is increasing year by year, so it is extremely difficult to increase the water diversion to solve the problem of water shortage for the growth of summer maize. Finally we put forth the following recommendations: (i) Selecting drought-resistant varieties, and improving the water resource use efficiency; (ii) Promoting the water and fertilizer coupling, sprinkler irrigation, drip irrigation, micro-irrigation and other water-saving irrigation technologies, and improving the water use efficiency; (iii) Promoting the ditch, ridge and laminating cultivation technology, reducing the field evapotranspiration, keeping warming and conserving moisture, and saving water resources; (iv) Strengthening the construction of water conservancy facilities, so that it can be irrigated during drought and drained during waterlogging; (v) During dry season, timely organizing artificial rainfall operation, and increasing precipitation in arid areas to ease drought; (vi) Rationally exploiting the groundwater, and improving the underground water use efficiency.