Platforms and hyper-choice on the World Wide Web

Choice is a sine qua non of contemporary life. From childhood until death, we are faced with an unending series of choices through which we cultivate a sense of self, govern conduct, and shape the future. Nowadays, individuals increasingly experience and enact consumer choice online through web-based platforms such as Yelp.com, TripAdvisor.com and Amazon.com. These platforms not only provide a sprawling array of goods and services to choose from, but also reviews, ratings and ranking devices and systems of classification to navigate this landscape of choice. This paper suggests a radical reconsideration of platform architectures and design features to consider how they reconfigure and respecify choice, 'choosers', and choice-making practices. Platforms are not simply cameras that present choice and enable comparisons between different options, but are more akin to engines that govern, drive and expand choice, configuring users within particular discourses, practices and subjectivities. In making sense of the entangled trajectories of consumer choice, platform architectures and Big Data, I suggest that 'hyper-choice' emerges as a condition of the contemporary platform-driven web. I examine hyper-choice not only in terms of the relationship between platforms and a growing abundance of choice, but more importantly how platforms reconfigure choice in ways that go beyond and fundamentally challenge existing understandings of what choice is, who and what is involved in producing knowledge about choice, and what it means to be a 'chooser'

Technologies of choice: The shaping of choice on the World Wide Web

Nowadays, choice is a ubiquitous aspect of everyday life. The emergence of the web has contributed to this explosion of choice, providing a seemingly endless landscape of goods and services to choose from. Whilst choice is held to be fundamental to individual freedom, wellbeing and self-identity, we currently have little understanding about how websites shape or govern choice, and what this might mean for individuals and society. This thesis undertakes a foundational examination of how choice is shaped in online spaces with respect to the design features and architecture of websites. Websites, or parts thereof, that are designed to enable users to navigate choice and compare between options to make decisions, are defined in this study as ‘Technologies of Choice’ (ToC). In undertaking the study, a phased, mixed methods approach was used. Drawing on several fields of literature, including science and technology studies, Foucaultian social theory, current and emerging social perspectives of choice, and Internet studies, a conceptual framework was developed for examining how choice is constructed and governed on the web. The ToC conceptual framework has four over-arching dimensions: ‘Having Choice‘, ‘Facilitating Choice’, ‘Knowledge Production’, and ‘Configuring Users’. The conceptual framework was then elaborated through an analysis of websites, resulting in 12 ‘sub-dimensions’ and 56 ‘features’. The 12 sub-dimensions categorise sets of ToC features that shape choice in particular ways, for example, the ‘scale’ at which choice is provided or the different ‘characteristics of commensurability’ that make comparisons possible. Following this, the resulting conceptual framework was applied as an analytical tool to categorise 500 top-ranking websites, using content analysis. Of these 500 websites, 193 (or 39%) were identified as ‘ToC websites’. The features of these 193 websites were analysed using descriptive statistics, multiple correspondence analysis, and hierarchical clustering, in order to determine the scale and patterns of distribution of ToC on the web, including whether there are broader ‘types’ of ToC that shape choice differently. ToC are found to be widespread on the web, constituting a kind of ‘infrastructure of modernity’. Whilst ToC are predominantly observed in the commercial settings of recreational services and personal goods, the thesis shows that they are also found in other contexts, including consumer information, health and social care, and in different countries. Although the choice-making literature focuses on comparisons between ‘products’, the study finds that ToC more commonly enable comparisons between private services (67% of ToC sites) than private goods (42% of ToC sites). Similarly, choice is not always global: a third of ToC websites scale down the options on offer, for example to a particular brand (e.g. Virgin Media or BMW). Despite the ubiquity of ToC, the thesis finds diversity in their design. ToC features are not deployed uniformly on the web: some features are widely used (e.g. ‘sortable lists’ and ‘nominal ratings’), some less so (e.g. ‘binary ratings’ and ‘verified accounts / purchases’), and some are often deployed together. Analysing these patterns reveals two broad types or ‘modalities’ of ToC, representing two different sets of ToC features that tend to be deployed together: ‘Delimited and Objective ToC’ and ‘Produsing ToC’. These two ToC modalities shape choice differently in terms of epistemology, individualisation and subjectivity, and political economy. The two ToC modalities are productive of two different ‘truth games’, as they seek to differently define and produce ‘legitimate’ knowledge about the options that are compared within the website. For ‘Produsing ToC’ websites, the web space is reactive to, and links up with, the individual characteristics and social capacities of users, whereas ‘Delimited and Objective ToC’ websites tend to configure users as undifferentiated, anonymous readers. The two ToC modalities are also positioned differently in terms of political economy. ‘Delimited and Objective ToC’ websites tend to provide carefully curated choice, for example by delimiting the scale of choice whilst providing the feeling of informed and global choice. In contrast, ‘Produsing ToC’ websites are found to provide a sprawling and ‘hyper’ landscape of choice that operates in feedback loops between users and website operators, procedures of algorithmic sorting, and global market processes. This thesis contributes to, and challenges, contemporary understandings of ‘choice’ in a web-mediated world. Theoretically and empirically, this study shows how seemingly mundane web-based technologies have a powerful and large-scale role in shaping individual and social realities: on the web, what appears as ‘free’ choice is highly shaped and governed. This study contributes a novel conceptual framework to the literature, providing a kind of ‘grammar’ to describe and analyse how choice is constructed on the web. Methodologically, the study makes a contribution to computational sociology, building theory by posing part of the analysis as a ‘data mining’ problem and using a novel application of statistical methods. Overall, the study charts new conceptual and empirical territory. It challenges the reader to think differently about the entangled trajectories of choice, technology, and consumerism

Trust and Credibility in Online Social Networks

Increasing portions of people's social and communicative activities now take place in the digital world. The growth and popularity of online social networks (OSNs) have tremendously facilitated online interaction and information exchange. As OSNs enable people to communicate more effectively, a large volume of user-generated content (UGC) is produced daily. As UGC contains valuable information, more people now turn to OSNs for news, opinions, and social networking. Besides users, companies and business owners also benefit from UGC as they utilize OSNs as the platforms for communicating with customers and marketing activities. Hence, UGC has a powerful impact on users' opinions and decisions. However, the openness of OSNs also brings concerns about trust and credibility online. The freedom and ease of publishing information online could lead to UGC with problematic quality. It has been observed that professional spammers are hired to insert deceptive content and promote harmful information in OSNs. It is known as the spamming problem, which jeopardizes the ecosystems of OSNs. The severity of the spamming problem has attracted the attention of researchers and many detection approaches have been proposed. However, most existing approaches are based on behavioral patterns. As spammers evolve to evade being detected by faking normal behaviors, these detection approaches may fail. In this dissertation, we present our work of detecting spammers by extracting behavioral patterns that are difficult to be manipulated in OSNs. We focus on two scenarios, review spamming and social bots. We first identify that the rating deviations and opinion deviations are invariant patterns in review spamming activities since the goal of review spamming is to insert deceptive reviews. We utilize the two kinds of deviations as clues for trust propagation and propose our detection mechanisms. For social bots detection, we identify the behavioral patterns among users in a neighborhood is difficult to be manipulated for a social bot and propose a neighborhood-based detection scheme. Our work shows that the trustworthiness of a user can be reflected in social relations and opinions expressed in the review content. Besides, our proposed features extracted from the neighborhood are useful for social bot detection

Graphs behind data: A network-based approach to model different scenarios

openAl giorno d’oggi, i contesti che possono beneficiare di tecniche di estrazione della conoscenza a partire dai dati grezzi sono aumentati drasticamente. Di conseguenza, la definizione di modelli capaci di rappresentare e gestire dati altamente eterogenei è un argomento di ricerca molto dibattuto in letteratura. In questa tesi, proponiamo una soluzione per affrontare tale problema. In particolare, riteniamo che la teoria dei grafi, e più nello specifico le reti complesse, insieme ai suoi concetti ed approcci, possano rappresentare una valida soluzione. Infatti, noi crediamo che le reti complesse possano costituire un modello unico ed unificante per rappresentare e gestire dati altamente eterogenei. Sulla base di questa premessa, mostriamo come gli stessi concetti ed approcci abbiano la potenzialità di affrontare con successo molti problemi aperti in diversi contesti. ​Nowadays, the amount and variety of scenarios that can benefit from techniques for extracting and managing knowledge from raw data have dramatically increased. As a result, the search for models capable of ensuring the representation and management of highly heterogeneous data is a hot topic in the data science literature. In this thesis, we aim to propose a solution to address this issue. In particular, we believe that graphs, and more specifically complex networks, as well as the concepts and approaches associated with them, can represent a solution to the problem mentioned above. In fact, we believe that they can be a unique and unifying model to uniformly represent and handle extremely heterogeneous data. Based on this premise, we show how the same concepts and/or approach has the potential to address different open issues in different contexts. ​INGEGNERIA DELL'INFORMAZIONEopenVirgili, Luc

Exploring online value destruction in consumer-to-consumer engagement

The current study advances the understanding of value destruction by conceptualising consumer-to-consumer online value destruction, explaining why and how consumers engage in it, and its consequences. Consumer empowerment is prominent in the utilisation of digital platforms. Engaged consumers seek information and share experiences with others, but their engagement in consumption-related activities online, such as product reviewing, can destroy value rather than create it. Value destruction research mostly focuses on providerinvolving interactions, which invokes a service orientation. By employing consumer-dominant logic, this study’s approach proposes a reorientation in value destruction conceptualisation to capture consumer-oriented insights which broadens perspective on the notion. This study adopts a multi-method qualitative design by employing netnography to examine consumers’ online value-destroying behaviour in Amazon reviews and consumer-created Facebook pages. This was followed by 18 semi-structured interviews with consumers who had engaged in online value-destroying behaviour. This study understands the nature, drivers, forms and consequences of consumerto-consumer online value destruction and introduces the factors potentially influencing online value destruction. It conceptualises consumer-to-consumer online value destruction as a process that reveals the roles of consumer engagement dimensions (cognitive, emotional and behavioural) before, during and after online value destruction. A key contribution is proposing that there is a positive element within the process of value destruction that is built on consumer collegiality and wellbeing. The current study also offers managerial implications and recommendations for mitigating and handling online value destruction

Polycentric Information Commons: A Theory Development and Empirical Investigation

Decentralized systems online—such as open source software (OSS) development, online communities, wikis, and social media—often experience decline in participation which threatens their long-terms sustainability. Building on a rich body of research on the sustainability of physical resource systems, this dissertation presents a novel theoretical framing that addresses the sustainability issues arising in decentralized systems online and which are amplified because of their open nature. The first essay develops the theory of polycentric information commons (PIC) which conceptualizes decentralized systems online as “information commons”. The theory defines information commons, the stakeholders that participate in them, the sustainability indicators of information commons and the collective-action threats putting pressure on their long-term sustainability. Drawing on Ostrom’s factors associated with stable common pool resource systems, PIC theory specifies four polycentric governance practices that can help information commons reduce the magnitude and impact of collective-action threats while improving the information commons’ sustainability. The second essay further develops PIC theory by applying it in an empirical context of “digital activism”. Specifically, it examines the role of polycentric governance in reducing the threats to the legitimacy of digital activism—a type of information commons with an overarching objective of instigating societal change. As such, it illustrates the applicability of PIC theory in the study of digital activism. The third essay focuses on the threat of “information pollution” and its impact on open collaboration, a type of information commons dedicated to the creation of value through open participation online. It uncovers the way polycentric governance mechanism help reduce the duration of pollution events. This essay contributes to PIC theory by expanding it to the realm of operational governance in open collaboration

Can Upward Brand Extensions be an Opportunity for Marketing Managers During the Covid-19 Pandemic and Beyond?

Early COVID-19 research has guided current managerial practice by introducing more products across different product categories as consumers tried to avoid perceived health risks from food shortages, i.e. horizontal brand extensions. For example, Leon, a fast-food restaurant in the UK, introduced a new range of ready meal products. However, when the food supply stabilised, availability may no longer be a concern for consumers. Instead, job losses could be a driver of higher perceived financial risks. Meanwhile, it remains unknown whether the perceived health or financial risks play a more significant role on consumers’ consumptions. Our preliminary survey shows perceived health risks outperform perceived financial risks to positively influence purchase intention during COVID-19. We suggest such a result indicates an opportunity for marketers to consider introducing premium priced products, i.e. upward brand extensions. The risk-as�feelings and signalling theories were used to explain consumer choice under risk may adopt affective heuristic processing, using minimal cognitive efforts to evaluate products. Based on this, consumers are likely to be affected by the salient high-quality and reliable product cue of upward extension signalled by its premium price level, which may attract consumers to purchase when they have high perceived health risks associated with COVID-19. Addressing this, a series of experimental studies confirm that upward brand extensions (versus normal new product introductions) can positively moderate the positive effect between perceived health risks associated with COVID-19 and purchase intention. Such an effect can be mediated by affective heuristic information processing. The results contribute to emergent COVID-19 literature and managerial practice during the pandemic but could also inform post-pandemic thinking around vertical brand extensions