Fighting Abuse while Promoting Free Speech: Policies to Reduce Opinion Manipulation in Online Platforms

With the rise of misinformation epidemic, this study aims to empirically investigate the consequences of an online commenting platform’s activity-capping policy on abusers’ and regular users’ activities. Utilizing a quasi-experimental setting, we find that restrictive policies not only curtail the activity of the abusers, but also promote the activity of regular users. Results show that the policy has asymmetric effect on abusers and regular users— while it effectively reduces the actions of the malicious users by 1.8%, it promotes the activities of the regular users by 2.2%. To better understand the behavioral change of the regular users, we draw from the rational economic perspective of voting decisions and provide initial evidence that such policy measures reinforce the subjective probability of being influential on the outcome. This study will provide valuable implications to managers and policy makers to estimate the consequences of and to combat against malicious behaviors in online platforms

How and When Review Length and Emotional Intensity Influence Review Helpfulness: Empirical Evidence from Epinions.com

Although longer reviews are generally considered more helpful, no research has investigated whether “the more the better” also applies to the expression of emotions. This paper explores the distinct effects of review length and emotional intensity. We propose that, in contrast to review length, the intensity of emotions has a negative effect on review helpfulness, and that this effect only applies to positive emotions. Additionally, drawing on elaboration likelihood model and the literature on the social functions of emotions, we predict that the respective effects of review length and emotional intensity are moderated by reviewer trustworthiness and the difficulty of reading review content. To test these hypotheses, we collected a rich data set from Epinions.com - a leading provider of consumer reviews. Our findings reveal the importance of taking the intensity of emotions into consideration when evaluating review helpfulness, and the results carry important practical implications

The Distinct Psychology of Smartphone Usage

One of the most important trends in today’s marketplace is consumers’ increased reliance on smartphones not only as a communication device but also as a central platform for accessing information, entertainment and other consumption activities—the so-called “mobile revolution” (Ackley 2015). While the marketing implications of mobile platforms are receiving emerging attention in the marketing modeling literature (e.g., Danaher et al. 2015; Ghose and Han 2011; Sultan et al. 2009), still very little is known about the consumption psychology of smartphone usage. The purpose of my dissertation is to address this void by examining what is fundamentally different about the psychology of smartphone use. The dissertation consists of two essays examining two complementary components of mobile consumer behavior. In the first essay I focus on clarifying the particular type of relationship that consumers form with their smartphones. Specifically, I advance the hypothesis that smartphones often fulfill the role of “attachment objects” for consumers. That is, smartphones are now used by many consumers in much the same way as pacifiers or security blankets are used by children—which I refer to as the Adult Pacifier Hypothesis. Consistent with this hypothesis, results from two controlled lab experiments show that relative to a comparable device such as one’s personal computer, engaging with one’s smartphone provides greater comfort as well as faster recovery from a stressful situation, both of which are defining characteristics of attachment objects. A third lab study reveals that, under feelings of stress, people actively seek out and engage with the device over other objects in much the same way that a child would seek out and engage with his or her pacifier. Also consistent with this hypothesis, a fourth study shows that the drive to use one’s smartphone becomes especially pronounced among consumers who have recently quit smoking—that is, consumers who are particularly susceptible to anxiety and stress. In the second essay I document an important consequence of consumers’ increased reliance on their smartphones: its impact on user-generated content. Across three field studies and six controlled lab experiments, I find that smartphone usage drives the creation of content that is more emotional, specifically more positively emotional, and potentially more impactful than content generated on PCs. Overall, these findings provide insight into the psychology of the mobile consumer and its downstream marketing implications

A study of manipulative and authentic negative reviews

Given users' growing penchant to use online reviews for travel planning, the business malpractice of posting manipulative reviews to distort the reputation of hotels is on the rise. Some manipulative reviews could be positive and intended to boost own offerings, while others could be negative and meant to slander competing ones. However, most scholarly inquiry hitherto been trained on the former. Hence, this paper investigates the extent to which linguistic cues such as readability, genre and writing style of negative reviews could help predict if they are manipulative or authentic. Analysis of a publicly available dataset of 800 negative reviews (400 manipulative + 400 authentic) indicates that manipulative reviews are generally less readable than authentic reviews. In terms of genre, although manipulative reviews should be imaginative and authentic reviews informative, spammers appear adept enough to blur the line between the two. With respect to writing style, manipulative reviews are more richly embellished with affective cues and perceptual words.Accepted versio