Can we sense shift in consumer behaviour in Portuguese retail companies due to the pandemic?

The 2019 coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has effects in the most diverse fields of our society, from mental health and lifestyle to commerce and education. A huge adaptation by the population and restructuring of habits was necessary to make progress in this new reality, leading several companies to reinvent the way they conducted their businesses and a complete metamorphosis of their business plans. As such, there was an interest in conducting this research to understand how consumer behaviour in Portuguese retail companies was affected by the lockdown in the country, aiming to identify the change in the purchase intention of consumers living in Portugal and what motivated this same change, allowing extracting information to help organizations in the decision making. Thus, 15,000 comments were collected from the social network Facebook referring to the pre-lockdown, lockdown, and post-lockdown period in Portugal. Then, data mining techniques and processes were used to clean the set of collected data and extract knowledge. Furthermore, an Intention Mining analysis was carried out to assess the collected comments and draw conclusions. Finally, the results of this study indicate a negative evolution in the purchase intention of consumers, verifying that the relationship with the company deteriorated and problems in the supply chain increased, indicating that it is necessary to redirect strategies to improve the service of customer support and distribution channels to meet customer satisfaction and may apply to other countries in similar contexts.A pandemia do coronavírus 2019 (COVID-19) tem efeitos nos mais diversos campos da sociedade, desde a saúde mental e estilo de vida, ao comércio e educação. Foi necessária uma enorme adaptação da população e reestruturação de hábitos para conseguir avançar nesta nova realidade, levando várias empresas a reinventar a forma como conduziam os seus negócios e a uma completa metamorfose dos respetivos planos de negócio. Como tal, surgiu o interesse em realizar esta investigação para compreender como o comportamento do consumidor nas empresas de retalho portuguesas foi afetado pelo confinamento no país, tendo como objetivo identificar a mudança na intenção de compra dos consumidores a viver em Portugal e o que motivou essa mesma mudança, permitindo extrair informações que permitam auxiliar na tomada de decisão das organizações. Assim, recolheram-se 15,000 comentários da rede social Facebook referentes ao período pré-confinamento, confinamento e pós-confinamento em Portugal. Em seguida, foram utilizados técnicas e processos de mineração de dados para limpeza do conjunto de dados recolhidos e extração de conhecimento. Ainda, realizou-se uma análise de mineração de intenções para avaliar os comentários recolhidos e extrair conclusões. Por fim, os resultados deste estudo indicam uma evolução negativa na intenção de compra dos consumidores, verificando-se que a relação com a empresa deteriorou-se e problemas ao nível da supply chain aumentaram, indicando ser necessário redirecionar as estratégias para melhorar o serviço de apoio ao cliente e os canais de distribuição para ir ao encontro da satisfação dos clientes, podendo ser aplicável a outros países em contextos semelhantes

How to monitor and generate intelligence for a DMO from online reviews

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Marketing IntelligenceSocial media and customer review websites have changed the way the tourism sector is managed. Social media has become a new source of information, due to the large amount of UGC / e-Wom generated by consumers An information that is "available" but at the same time noisy and of great volume, which makes it difficult to access and analyze. This study investigates and verifies the possibility of using data present in content reviews of a Content Web Site Review - TripAdivsor - to generate actionable information for a Destination Management Organization. With a focus on negative reviews, tourist attractions of Lisbon and using the “R code” and its packages, the study shows that with the correct technique chosen and the action of an intelligence analyst, data can be extracted and provide substrate for actions, strategy and intelligence generation – which is Social Media Intelligence. The findings prove that the flood of web 2.0 data can serve as a source of intelligence for the Destination Management Organization (DMO). By monitoring sites like TripAdvisor, a DMO can hear what tourists talk about attractions and thereby generate insights for intelligence and strategy actions. A DMO can even, analyzing this data, make your attractions more desirable, and even act in adverse situations, reducing risky situations

Twitter Sentiment Analysis

Social media continues to gain increased presence and importance in society. Public and private opinion about a wide variety of subjects are expressed and spread continually via numerous social media. Twitter is one of the social media that is gaining increased popular. Twitter offers organizations a fast and effective way to analyze customers‟ perspectives toward the critical to success in the marketplace. Developing a program for sentiment analysis is an approach to be used to computationally measure customers‟ perceptions. This paper reports on the design of a sentiment analysis extracting a vast amount of tweets. Prototyping is used in this development. Results classify customers‟ perspective via tweets into positive and negative which is represented in pie chart and html page. However, the program has planned to develop on web application system but due to limitation of Django which can be worked on Linux server or LAMP, for further this approach need to be done

Exploring determinants of attraction and helpfulness of online product review:a consumer behaviour perspective

To assist filtering and sorting massive review messages, this paper attempts to examine the determinants of review attraction and helpfulness. Our analysis divides consumers’ reading process into “notice stage” and “comprehend stage” and considers the impact of “explicit information” and “implicit information” of review attraction and review helpfulness. 633 online product reviews were collected from Amazon China. A mixed-method approach is employed to test the conceptual model proposed for examining the influencing factors of review attraction and helpfulness. The empirical results show that reviews with negative extremity, more words, and higher reviewer rank easily gain more attraction and reviews with negative extremity, higher reviewer rank, mixed subjective property, and mixed sentiment seem to be more helpful. The research findings provide some important insights, which will help online businesses to encourage consumers to write good quality reviews and take more active actions to maximise the value of online reviews

Interactive Multimedia Teaching of Accounting Information System (AIS) Cycles: Student Perceptions and Views.

This paper describes the design and development of a CD ROM intended to assist students' learning by bringing a sense of reality to the concepts studied in relation to Accounting Information Systems cycles. The educational design is underpinned by constructivist theories of learning which espouse the benefits of experiential learning in facilitating effective student learning. Three Australian companies - Warner Bros. Movie World, Golden Circle and Zupps Parts – are featured on the CD ROM to provide virtual 'experiential learning experiences' for students. An extensive evaluation of the CD ROM was conducted, involving both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, to ascertain students' perceived value of the CD ROM in assisting their learning. Results indicate that the CD ROM offered students a real life understanding of applicable concepts and that students were receptive to learning in online environments which are appropriately designed and constructed

LegalBench: A Collaboratively Built Benchmark for Measuring Legal Reasoning in Large Language Models

The advent of large language models (LLMs) and their adoption by the legal community has given rise to the question: what types of legal reasoning can LLMs perform? To enable greater study of this question, we present LegalBench: a collaboratively constructed legal reasoning benchmark consisting of 162 tasks covering six different types of legal reasoning. LegalBench was built through an interdisciplinary process, in which we collected tasks designed and hand-crafted by legal professionals. Because these subject matter experts took a leading role in construction, tasks either measure legal reasoning capabilities that are practically useful, or measure reasoning skills that lawyers find interesting. To enable cross-disciplinary conversations about LLMs in the law, we additionally show how popular legal frameworks for describing legal reasoning—which distinguish between its many forms—correspond to LegalBench tasks, thus giving lawyers and LLM developers a common vocabulary. This paper describes LegalBench, presents an empirical evaluation of 20 open-source and commercial LLMs, and illustrates the types of research explorations LegalBench enables

Innovation and Competition Policy, Ch. 5 (2d ed): Competition and Innovation in Copyright and the DMCA

This book of CASES AND MATERIALS ON INNOVATION AND COMPETITION POLICY is intended for educational use. The book is free for all to use subject to an open source license agreement. It differs from IP/antitrust casebooks in that it considers numerous sources of competition policy in addition to antitrust, including those that emanate from the intellectual property laws themselves, and also related issues such as the relationship between market structure and innovation, the competitive consequences of regulatory rules governing technology competition such as net neutrality and interconnection, misuse, the first sale doctrine, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Chapters will be updated frequently. The author uses this casebook for a three-unit class in Innovation and Competition Policy taught at the University of Iowa College of Law and available to first year law students as an elective. This document is Chapter 5, second edition, on competition policy and the Copyright Act and DMCA

The electronic word-of-mouth in rural tourism: the case of schist villages

The rural area has undergone many transformations in terms of functionality and identity resulting in an attempt to grow tourism to improve environmental, economic, social and cultural promotion, preservation and revitalization of these areas when compared to urban spaces that are much more developed. In this way, tourism in rural areas (TER) in Portugal is seen as a driving force for the community development and its entire surrounding. Over the years, technologies have been constantly evolving. This has been reflected in people’s decision-making process and, consequently, how they purchase their products and services. Tourists increasingly use online reviews made by other users in their travel planning, which contain descriptive comments and/or a rating system, named as electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). In this way, this study intends to understand the evolution of the eWOM in rural tourism, by studying the main characteristics that influence consumers’ satisfaction. To that end, the content of the comments and quantitative classification of Schist Villages lodgings on the platforms of TripAdvisor and Facebook were studied, using extraction, polarity and frequency techniques as well as the SPSS program for the analysis.O espaço rural tem sofrido muitas transformações em termos de funcionalidade e de identidade resultando numa tentativa de crescimento voltado para o turismo com o objetivo de melhorar a promoção, preservação e revitalização ambiental, económica, social e cultural destas zonas quando comparadas com áreas urbanas que estão muito mais desenvolvidas. Deste modo, o turismo em espaço rural (TER) em Portugal é visto como impulsor da comunidade e de toda a sua envolvência. O facto de as tecnologias terem-se desenvolvido constantemente ao longo dos anos, refletiu-se no modo como as pessoas realizam o seu processo de decisão e, consequentemente, a compra dos seus produtos e serviços. Os turistas utilizam cada vez mais as revisões "online" feitas por outros usuários no planeamento da sua viagem, que contêm comentários descritivos e sistema de classificação por escala, chamado "word-of-mouth" eletrónico (eWOM). Desta forma, este estudo pretende analisar a evolução do eWOM no turismo rural, estudando os principais atributos que influenciam a satisfação dos consumidores. Para tal, o conteúdo dos comentários e a classificação quantitativa dos alojamentos das Aldeias do Xisto nas plataformas "TripAdvisor" e "Facebook" foram estudados, utilizando técnicas de extração, polaridade e frequência, e ainda o programa SPSS para a sua análise