What attracts vehicle consumers’ buying:A Saaty scale-based VIKOR (SSC-VIKOR) approach from after-sales textual perspective?

Purpose: The increasingly booming e-commerce development has stimulated vehicle consumers to express individual reviews through online forum. The purpose of this paper is to probe into the vehicle consumer consumption behavior and make recommendations for potential consumers from textual comments viewpoint. Design/methodology/approach: A big data analytic-based approach is designed to discover vehicle consumer consumption behavior from online perspective. To reduce subjectivity of expert-based approaches, a parallel Naïve Bayes approach is designed to analyze the sentiment analysis, and the Saaty scale-based (SSC) scoring rule is employed to obtain specific sentimental value of attribute class, contributing to the multi-grade sentiment classification. To achieve the intelligent recommendation for potential vehicle customers, a novel SSC-VIKOR approach is developed to prioritize vehicle brand candidates from a big data analytical viewpoint. Findings: The big data analytics argue that “cost-effectiveness” characteristic is the most important factor that vehicle consumers care, and the data mining results enable automakers to better understand consumer consumption behavior. Research limitations/implications: The case study illustrates the effectiveness of the integrated method, contributing to much more precise operations management on marketing strategy, quality improvement and intelligent recommendation. Originality/value: Researches of consumer consumption behavior are usually based on survey-based methods, and mostly previous studies about comments analysis focus on binary analysis. The hybrid SSC-VIKOR approach is developed to fill the gap from the big data perspective

#PrettyLittleLiars: ABC Family in TV’s Post-Network Era

This thesis explores the branding of ABC Family as a home for ‘Millennial’ viewers through its original TV drama programme, Pretty Little Liars. ABC Family emerged during what Amanda Lotz (2007) terms the ‘post-network’ era of American television, a period that has been characterised by fierce inter-network competition and the availability of TV programming on a larger array of platforms, including online platforms. These revolutionary changes have been coupled with the emergence of a commercially desirable demographic known as the ‘Millennials’, a group of young people who are considered to be ‘native’ to this ‘post-network’ environment and whose media use and preferences are challenging networks to revise their strategies and develop programmes that aim to solicit their attention and engagement. Pretty Little Liars has been specifically constructed to assert the brand identity of ABC Family as a channel “for and about Millennials” (Liesse A2). This programme has sought to distinguish itself within teen-oriented TV drama by incorporating cinematic aesthetics, serial storytelling, narrative complexity, and intertextuality – all of which have been characteristic of adult-oriented ‘high-end’ TV drama in the ‘post-network’ era. Pretty Little Liars has supplemented these efforts to distinguish itself by cultivating a thriving online presence. Important to this online presence are the use of ‘transmedia storytelling’ and social media. As this thesis demonstrates, transmedia storytelling and social media have the capacity to significantly extend the experience of a TV programme beyond what is aired on television. Importantly, their deployment in support of Pretty Little Liars has been successful in encouraging consistent viewing of new episodes as they are broadcast, a pattern that persists despite the post-network era’s capacity for delayed viewing on alternative platforms. This thesis undertakes an in-depth examination of ABC Family’s ‘post-network’ strategy in three chapters, each of which takes a different critical perspective. Chapter One examines the internal and external challenges that contributed to the emergence of ABC Family’s rebranding. Chapter Two analyses Pretty Little Liars as a ‘high end’ teen-oriented TV drama that functions to elevate the profile of ABC Family while simultaneously engaging ‘Millennial’ viewers. Finally, Chapter Three explores the transmedia extensions of Pretty Little Liars that function to supplement the television narrative in ways that encourage and reward consistent viewing patterns and long-term loyalty

Essays on Market Efficiency in Bond and Equity Markets

Studien zu Markteffizienz in Anleihe- und Aktienmärkten:Rational expectations and asset prices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.2 Non rational expectations and asset prices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.3 Information - key element for financial markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2 Research Overview 8 2.1 Research focus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 2.2 Thesis constituents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 2.3 Topical relatedness and thematic context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.4 Research contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 3 Research Articles 14 3.1 Measuring Trump: The Volfefe Index and its Impact on European Fi- nancial Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 3.2 How floating rate notes stopped floating: Evidence from the negative interest rate regime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 3.3 Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google - A Correlation Analysis: Evi- dence from a DCC-GARCH Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 3.4 Trump Tweet Impacts on the MSCI World Exposure with China Index - Evidence from an Event Study Deploying Cumulative Abnormal Returns 19 3.5 Euro Area Sovereign Ratings and the Rescue Funds: A Wavelet Trans- form Coherence Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 4 Selected Topics 22 4.1 Information efficiency and Twitter sentiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 4.1.1 Information and its transmission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 4.1.2 Twitter market impact measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 4.2 Negative interest rates in the Euro Area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 4.2.1 Bond markets in uncharted territory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 4.2.2 Impacts on pricing and trading for non linear products . . . . . 27 5 Conclusions and Outlook 29 References 32 V Appendix Original Research Articles 39 V

Journalistic Independence: How social media are reshaping power structures in news broadcasting

Content provided via social media from various conflict hotspots raises the question as to how social media are changing news broadcasting. Social media are and still continue playing a major role in the on-going Arab Spring, Occupy, and Wall Street movements.[i] Developments such as this highlight the important role of social media regarding the opinion forming process in the public domain during times of war and social unrest.The conflict in Ukraine serves as an example: news broadcasters have been reproached of one sided reporting, i.e. the role of neo-fascists in the new Ukrainian government has been understated and Russia stands accused to have sent troops into Ukraine. Social media are increasingly used by news organisations and citizens alike to report from the frontlines. Can social media deliver on its promises of more democracy and transparency in news broadcasting?At the same time it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between real user-generated content and content provided by questionable sources delivering social media propaganda. An example is the portrayal of Arseni Jakzenjuk, former and unelected president of Ukraine: manipulated pictures of him have been circulating online creating the impression that he was greeting visitors to a rally with a Nazi salute[ii].The civil conflict in Ukraine demonstrates how social media challenge the domination of traditional mass broadcast media. User generated content and the unique characteristics of social media are challenging the traditional relations between media and political authorities. Responding to these new developments, political authorities are changing their audience outreach strategies.This paper examines how users are reading mainstream news and are participating in the production of information on social media.  Are social media providing a real alternative to mainstream news? Can citizens make better choices based on social media information? How much misinformation is saturating social media to confuse the public domain? 

Sentiment analysis and real-time microblog search

This thesis sets out to examine the role played by sentiment in real-time microblog search. The recent prominence of the real-time web is proving both challenging and disruptive for a number of areas of research, notably information retrieval and web data mining. User-generated content on the real-time web is perhaps best epitomised by content on microblogging platforms, such as Twitter. Given the substantial quantity of microblog posts that may be relevant to a user query at a given point in time, automated methods are required to enable users to sift through this information. As an area of research reaching maturity, sentiment analysis offers a promising direction for modelling the text content in microblog streams. In this thesis we review the real-time web as a new area of focus for sentiment analysis, with a specific focus on microblogging. We propose a system and method for evaluating the effect of sentiment on perceived search quality in real-time microblog search scenarios. Initially we provide an evaluation of sentiment analysis using supervised learning for classi- fying the short, informal content in microblog posts. We then evaluate our sentiment-based filtering system for microblog search in a user study with simulated real-time scenarios. Lastly, we conduct real-time user studies for the live broadcast of the popular television programme, the X Factor, and for the Leaders Debate during the Irish General Election. We find that we are able to satisfactorily classify positive, negative and neutral sentiment in microblog posts. We also find a significant role played by sentiment in many microblog search scenarios, observing some detrimental effects in filtering out certain sentiment types. We make a series of observations regarding associations between document-level sentiment and user feedback, including associations with user profile attributes, and users’ prior topic sentiment