Theses and Dissertations Collection

This thesis consists of three separate chapters, which cover upstream and downstream of the agri-food supply chain. In the first chapter, I revisit the price and volatility transmission mechanism among natural gas, fertilizer, and corn markets between 2011 and 2021. The results turn out natural gas price returns in the short-term are significantly affected by its lagged returns from itself and corn markets, and it will be affected by its lagged return sand fertilizer markets. In the second chapter, I explore the role of the collective reputation of online platforms in agri-food live streaming. The case study uses Taobao Live as an example and I explore the relationship between the collective reputation of online platforms and live streaming revenue. The main result shows that small agri-business owners who want to adopt live streaming to make money should launch their live streaming on a platform with a collective reputation. The third chapter analyzes the photo content in an online review platform. It studies the impact of photo content differences between business owners and customers on restaurant ratings. By constructing a new dataset and building the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model to find the latent of each photo, I found out the photo content in specific topics (the Dish, Protein Food, Dessert) has a positive impact on restaurant rating. It means that business owners can boost their rating by increasing the number of photos regarding these topics.