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讲座题目：How Online Forums Shape Risk Attitudes and Returns（网络论坛如何影响风险态度与回报）

主讲人：曹冀苏   亚利桑那州立大学

时间：2025年06月26日14:00

地点：学院419

内容摘要：

Online forums offer users a virtual space with low costs to exchange rich information with diverse individuals. However, their impact on decision-making remains uncertain—whether they help or harm users depends largely on the representativeness of the information, as online forums can contain misleading or exaggerated content designed to attract attention. In this paper, we examine how consumption of online forum information affects decision makings and their outcomes, with a unique setting of online sports betting—where gamblers’ betting decisions are directly linked to financial outcomes and heavily influenced by game information and other gamblers’ opinions. We study how information from online forums affects bettors’ risk attitudes, gambling behaviors, and financial returns. Our analysis suggests that greater exposure to forum content encourages risk-taking but does not necessarily improve financial outcomes. For every additional post a bettor reads, a bettor’s wager amount rises by 7.54%, while net returns decline by 87 cents. Further analyses reveal that the information shared on online forums is biased toward high-risk events–the betting odds shared on forum posts are often much higher than the overall betting odds and therefore are not a fair characterization of how other bettors evaluate gambling risks. Relying on this biased information can potentially skew information seekers’ perceptions and lead them to place riskier bets with lower likelihoods of success. We further find that this bias likely stems from the fact that extreme bets attract more attention, motivating forum contributors to post wagers with lower chances of winning.

在线论坛为用户提供了一个低成本的虚拟空间，使他们能够与不同背景的人交流丰富的信息。然而，这些论坛对决策的影响仍不确定——它们究竟是帮助还是误导用户，在很大程度上取决于信息的代表性。因为网络论坛中可能包含为了吸引注意而发布的误导性或夸张内容。本文探讨了在一个独特的背景下——网络体育博彩中，在线论坛信息的获取如何影响人们的决策行为及其结果。在这个背景下，赌徒的投注决策与财务结果直接相关，且高度依赖于比赛信息和其他赌徒的观点。我们研究了在线论坛中的信息如何影响赌徒的风险态度、赌博行为和财务回报。分析表明，接触论坛内容越多，会促使赌徒更倾向于冒险，但这并不一定能带来更好的财务结果。每阅读一篇额外的帖子，赌徒的投注金额平均会上升7.54%，但净回报却减少了87美分。进一步分析显示，在线论坛中分享的信息存在偏向高风险事件的倾向——帖文中提到的投注赔率通常远高于总体赔率，因此不能公平反映其他赌徒对赌博风险的评估。依赖这些偏见信息可能会扭曲信息搜寻者的认知，引导他们下更高风险、成功概率更低的赌注。我们还发现，这种偏见很可能源自于极端赌注更能吸引注意，从而促使论坛贡献者发布那些中奖概率较低的投注内容。

主讲人简介：

曹冀苏，美国亚利桑那州立大学 (Arizona State University) 凯瑞商学院 (WP Carey School of Business) 信息系统学助理教授。研究兴趣包括人工智能伦理及治理方案、数字平台、社交媒体等方向。研究成果发表在Management Science, MIS Quarterly 等顶级学术期刊上，并获得2018 ICIS最佳主题论文、2025AOM最佳接收论文等多个奖项。