Online reputation systems play an important role in reducing consumers’ purchase uncertainty in online shopping. However, some sellers manipulate reviews for their own interests, which reduces the effectiveness of the reputation system. Unlike the previous studies, which focus on features of reviews and reviewers, this study establishes a game model to analyze sellers’ manipulation behavior and identifies what kind of sellers or under what scenario sellers are motivated to manipulate reviews. Our study provides a new perspective for platform to detect fake reviews and helps consumers to make good use of online reviews without getting trapped in some sellers’ fraudulent manipulation.

Green technology investment is an important factor that influences the sustainability and performance of the supply chain. In this paper, we use the game-theoretic approach, which is quite suitable to operation decision research, to model a supply chain consisting of one supplier and one retailer and discuss who should invest in green technology in a decentralized supply chain under demand uncertainty. An important result we found is that the retailer has a stronger investment motivation and higher investment efficiency compared to the supplier. The retailer also tends to invest in green technology himself when customers are not so sensitive to the product’s retail price. We analyze the supply chain sustainability, and find that high levels of green technology investments are not always necessarily good for environmental sustainability, it depends on the environmental impact’s sensitivity to green technology. Lastly, a joint investment mechanism is designed to induce the retailer to join in the green technology investment when he has no investment intention, and that realizes a Pareto improvement of the supply chain. Based on the results, we recommend designing more incentive mechanisms to induce the retailers to join in the green technology investment according to supply chain conditions.

Compatibility or competition is a key strategic decision for multihoming software developers. Compatibility is a strategy by which companies set up their software to be more compatible with their competitors’ products, while competition is an opposite strategy by which the companies set up their software without any compatibility. We study the strategic decision of a multihoming software company that competes with two firms on different operating systems, (such as Windows and Mac). By formalizing a game-theoretic model to capture the motivation of a multihoming software developer, we find that the compatibility strategy is mainly incentivized by the trade-off between the spillover effect and the compatibility cost. We then solve for reasonable software prices and compatibility level given the market potential from the software firms’ perspective. Several managerial guidelines are obtained to determine the optimal decision in the software development economy. Interestingly, when both the spillover effect and the compatibility cost are low enough, the multihoming software firm still chooses the competing strategy. Finally, by reporting the numerical analysis, we verify the effectiveness of the theoretical results derived in our model.