Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis paper is a collection of three articles on the subject of the motivational influences of online platforms and social media. The cases of crowdfunding and employment markets are addressed. The first two articles are intended to contribute to the scholarly literature on online social media and influence while the final article is intended for a practitioner audience. The first article addresses the case of crowdfunding and discusses how less experienced investors can be influenced in their investment decisions by more experienced investors. A method of paired comparisons is proposed that can allow more experienced investors to demonstrate their skills in absence of any information about their actual investment returns. The results of this paired comparison exercised, if shared with less experienced investors in an online investment platform, can motivate these less experienced investors to follow those with demonstrated skills, which can improve their returns. The second article addresses the employment market. Online social media that discusses a company's social responsibility activity can motivate heterogeneous job candidates in different ways depending on their characteristics. Guided by expectancy motivation theory, this paper manipulates online social media content to demonstrate how job candidates might be motivated to apply by different content, and how candidates might be motivated differently when viewing the same content based on the value that they place on the company characteristics that they perceive. The final article is a practitioner piece that illustrates a technique dubbed the PEACE Protocol for communicating employee-centered SR activity via online social media. This article is intended to provide guidance for active managers and to set the context for additional scholarship on the subject of SR communication