20,648 research outputs found

    Word of Mouth, the Importance of Reviews and Ratings in Tourism Marketing

    Get PDF
    The Internet and social media have given place to what is commonly known as the democratization of content and this phenomenon is changing the way that consumers and companies interact. Business strategies are shifting from influencing consumers directly and induce sales to mediating the influence that Internet users have on each other. A consumer review is “a mixture of fact and opinion, impression and sentiment, found and unfound tidbits, experiences, and even rumor” (Blackshaw & Nazarro, 2006). Consumers' comments are seen as honest and transparent, but it is their subjective perception what shapes the behavior of other potential consumers. With the emergence of the Internet, tourists search for information and reviews of destinations, hotels or services. Several studies have highlighted the great influence of online reputation through reviews and ratings and how it affects purchasing decisions by others (Schuckert, Liu, & Law, 2015). These reviews are seen as unbiased and trustworthy, and considered to reduce uncertainty and perceived risks (Gretzel & Yoo, 2008; Park & Nicolau, 2015). Before choosing a destination, tourists are likely to spend a significant amount of time searching for information including reviews of other tourists posted on the Internet. The average traveler browses 38 websites prior to purchasing vacation packages (Schaal, 2013), which may include tourism forums, online reviews in booking sites and other generic social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

    How to Create an Innovation Accelerator

    Full text link
    Too many policy failures are fundamentally failures of knowledge. This has become particularly apparent during the recent financial and economic crisis, which is questioning the validity of mainstream scholarly paradigms. We propose to pursue a multi-disciplinary approach and to establish new institutional settings which remove or reduce obstacles impeding efficient knowledge creation. We provided suggestions on (i) how to modernize and improve the academic publication system, and (ii) how to support scientific coordination, communication, and co-creation in large-scale multi-disciplinary projects. Both constitute important elements of what we envision to be a novel ICT infrastructure called "Innovation Accelerator" or "Knowledge Accelerator".Comment: 32 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

    QoS based Effective and Efficient Selection of Web Service and Retrieval of Search Information

    Get PDF
    Web services are integrated software components for the support of interoperable machine to machine interaction over a network. Web services have been widely employed for building service-oriented applications in both industry and academia in recent years. The number of publicly available Web services is steadily increasing on the Internet. However, this proliferation makes it hard for a user to select a proper Web service among a large amount of service candidates. An inappropriate service selection may cause many problems to the resulting applications. In this paper, a novel collaborative filtering-based Web service recommender system is proposed to help the users and select services with optimal QoS performance. Our recommender system employ an effective and efficient selection of web services and relevant retrieval of information and makes personalized service recommendation to users based on the clustering results. Compared with existing service recommendation methods, the proposed approach achieves considerable improvement on the recommendation accuracy and the QoS performance metrics adopted in this paper shows the better accuracy and relevant web services

    Trust Strategies for the Semantic Web

    Get PDF
    Everyone agrees on the importance of enabling trust on the SemanticWebto ensure more efficient agent interaction. Current research on trust seems to focus on developing computational models, semantic representations, inference techniques, etc. However, little attention has been given to the plausible trust strategies or tactics that an agent can follow when interacting with other agents on the Semantic Web. In this paper we identify five most common strategies of trust and discuss their envisaged costs and benefits. The aim is to provide some guidelines to help system developers appreciate the risks and gains involved with each trust strategy

    Knowledge society arguments revisited in the semantic technologies era

    No full text
    In the light of high profile governmental and international efforts to realise the knowledge society, I review the arguments made for and against it from a technology standpoint. I focus on advanced knowledge technologies with applications on a large scale and in open- ended environments like the World Wide Web and its ambitious extension, the Semantic Web. I argue for a greater role of social networks in a knowledge society and I explore the recent developments in mechanised trust, knowledge certification, and speculate on their blending with traditional societal institutions. These form the basis of a sketched roadmap for enabling technologies for a knowledge society

    Recommender Systems

    Get PDF
    The ongoing rapid expansion of the Internet greatly increases the necessity of effective recommender systems for filtering the abundant information. Extensive research for recommender systems is conducted by a broad range of communities including social and computer scientists, physicists, and interdisciplinary researchers. Despite substantial theoretical and practical achievements, unification and comparison of different approaches are lacking, which impedes further advances. In this article, we review recent developments in recommender systems and discuss the major challenges. We compare and evaluate available algorithms and examine their roles in the future developments. In addition to algorithms, physical aspects are described to illustrate macroscopic behavior of recommender systems. Potential impacts and future directions are discussed. We emphasize that recommendation has a great scientific depth and combines diverse research fields which makes it of interests for physicists as well as interdisciplinary researchers.Comment: 97 pages, 20 figures (To appear in Physics Reports

    Leveraging Offshore IT Outsourcing by SMEs through Online Marketplaces

    Get PDF
    Following their larger counterparts, an increasing number of small firms outsource their IT tasks to lower cost offshore destinations. For small firms, however, offshore outsourcing is a difficult undertaking as it involves high transaction costs. Online marketplaces for IT services, which have recently become available to small firms, make offshore IT outsourcing more accessible and manageable, although differences in the marketplace design result in varying outcomes across the marketplaces. This has consequences for SMEñ€ℱs decision as to which online marketplace to use, because different markets may have different types of benefits and costs. This paper sets to analyze some of the similarities and differences between online marketplaces for IT services and their effects for small firms. First, we analyze if and how online marketplaces reduce small firmsñ€ℱ transaction costs in offshore IT outsourcing. Second, we examine the effects of market entry barriers on outcomes of online marketplaces and their implications for small firms. The results indicate that online marketplaces for IT services do reduce transaction costs for small firms in offshore outsourcing across ten specific market processes. More surprising, however, is the finding that the lower market entry barriers for suppliers result in lower prices for buyers without compromising other aspects of market performance.Offshore IT Outsourcing;Online Market;Process-Stakeholder Analysis;Reverse Auction

    Please rate after riding : the impact of formal evaluation on consumers’ feedback

    Get PDF
    Advances in Information Technology along with changes in society have allowed for the emergence of collaborative services. The act of sharing among peers -in substitution to ownership- is a growing phenomenon with many successful companies having arisen in the last decade. Since this new economy works mostly on the basis of sharing among strangers, mechanisms for identifying good and ‘bad’ users have become a necessity. One popular tool is a mechanism that allows for mutual evaluation among platform users (peer-providers and peer- users) using reviews and/or ratings as forms of evaluation. However, often users will give a biased feedback or attenuate negative evaluations of their peers due to the nature of collaborative services, where interactions are more personal and social norms seem to exist. This represents a problem especially in situations where the service provided has a failure that goes unreported. Although collaborative services are growing in popularity, few studies have been carried out to investigate how pro-social norms are integrated into practices and interactions between peers. To examine factors leading to feedback bias and its boundary conditions, we conducted two scenario-based experiments online using the context of an on-demand transportation service. We compared feedback (in the form of rating and tip) in a formal type of evaluation to a control condition (i.e. informal). In Study 1, we find that feedback bias in a formal evaluation system can be explained by forgiveness. Furthermore, that the type of service failure directly impacts feedback bias with perceived quality compromised by the failure being a mediator for this effect. We also find tip to be a less biased form of feedback than ratings. In Study 2, we confirm results of Study 1, and investigate overall driver score as a boundary condition for the effect of type of evaluation on feedback. Results show that a high peer score leads to feedback bias in a formal type of evaluation. Additionally, we find anticipation of guilt to be another mediator for the effect of type of evaluation on feedback. Managerial implications and suggestions for further research are discussed
    • 

    corecore