Social interactions impact on product and service development

Digital marketing has enabled a new style of consumerism. Nowadays consumers play active roles in product designing and service development. Social media and user-generated content give consumers possibilities to have some interactions regarding the new or existing product. This gives new opportunities to developers and empowers costumers to be involved in product and service development more than they used to be. While traditional marketing literature typically illustrates consumers as passive recipients this paper will show that digital marketing gives them chance to be actively involved in product and service development, tries to define how social interactions effects development and offers a conceptual model for future research. From the literature, it has emerged that social influence has a big impact on product and service development. This study will be important mostly for those companies who try to implement digital technologies now, as for companies who already adopted these technologies some time ago but they still can't find benefits from it. In the academic field, this paper will help researchers for their future work. Marketing inferences are drawn, and direction for future research is developed in the entire manuscript.Internal Grant Agency of FaME through TBU in Zlin [IGA/FaME/2020/002

Dynamic Restaurants Quality Mapping Using Online User Reviews

Millions of users post comments to TripAdvisor daily, together with a numeric evaluation of their experience using a rating scale of between 1 and 5 stars. At the same time, inspectors dispatched by national and local authorities visit restaurant premises regularly to audit hygiene standards, safe food practices, and overall cleanliness. The purpose of our study is to analyze the use of online-generated reviews (OGRs) as a tool to complement official restaurant inspection procedures. Our case study-based approach, with the help of a Python-based scraping library, consists of collecting OGR data from TripAdvisor and comparing them to extant restaurants’ health inspection reports. Our findings reveal that a correlation does exist between OGRs and national health system scorings. In other words, OGRs were found to provide valid indicators of restaurant quality based on inspection ratings and can thus contribute to the prevention of foodborne illness among citizens in real time. The originality of the paper resides in the use of big data and social network data as a an easily accessible, zero-cost, and complementary tool in disease prevention systems. Incorporated in restaurant management dashboards, it will aid in determining what action plans are necessary to improve quality and customer experience on the premises

A Conceptual Framework for Enhancing Product Search with Product Information from Reviews

Product search today is limited, as users can only search and filter for a restricted set of product features, e.g. 15” and 1TB hard disk when searching for a laptop. The often decision- critical aspects of a product are however hidden in user reviews (“noisy fan” or “bright display”) and are not available until a product has been found. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for the integration of product aspects, that have been mined and derived from consumer reviews, into the product search. The framework structures the challenges that arise in four major fields and gives an overview of existing research for each one of them: Data challenges, user experience challenges, purchase process challenges and business challenges. It may inform researchers from various disciplines to perform target-oriented research as well as practitioners what to consider when building up such an enriched product search

Measure and Mitigate the Dimensional Bias in Online Reviews and Ratings

Online word-of-mouth in the form of online reviews and ratings is an increasingly important resource for consumers to acquire product information for their purchase decision. However, dimensional review bias, originated from consumer heterogeneity and their multidimensional product preferences and experiences, have been shown to undermine the information transfer among consumers. Through a novel text mining approach, we identify and quantify two types of dimensional bias from textual reviews: dimensional preference bias and dimensional rating bias. We also introduce a quantitative method to mitigate the dimensional rating bias. We examined the effectiveness and applicability of our bias measures and de-bias method in the context of multi-dimensional and single-dimensional rating systems. Specifically, we focused on the hotel reviews on TripAdvisor.com and Expedia.com. Our preliminary results showed promising theoretical and managerial contributions

Head over Feels? Differences in Online Rating Behavior for Utilitarian and Hedonic Service Aspects

Online reviews play a considerable role in reducing the information asymmetry between sellers and potential consumers. Despite the rich body of literature on online reviews, little is known about how the chosen content of reviews influences the rating behavior. As products or services offer more than one possible evaluation characteristic, different reviews on a product or service refer to different characteristics. In our research-in-progress we investigate to what extent the valence of online ratings differs depending on whether the rating refers to utilitarian characteristic or hedonic characteristics. To answer this question, we crawled 55,601 customer reviews on Google Maps of visits to 149 German theaters and classified each review as being primarily utilitarian, hedonic, or ambiguous. For our dataset we can determine that reviews with hedonic content are on average 0.48 stars higher rated than utilitarian reviews. Our results carry substantial managerial implications for designers of review platforms and customers

Goal Pursuit of Sellers in Hierarchical Online Reputation Systems

To understand sellers’ reputation status more intuitively and quickly, a hierarchical reputation system is routinely deployed by online C2C marketplaces, where reputation scores are divided into several grades shown in badges. It not only helps the consumers but also unintentionally introduces the incentive hierarchies to motivate sellers to pursuit the reputation goals. Yet the existing literature remains largely unclear whether sellers’ goal pursuit behavior exists in the context of electronic commerce. We gathered data from a large online marketplace to answer this question. The results show that sellers will exert more efforts (i.e., take discounts) when their absolute reputation scores are closer to the threshold of next grade. Moreover, low value products and high value products decrease more than median value products. This relationship is moderated by sellers’ relative position in their current grade. Our findings contribute both goal pursuit and online market literature and have direct managerial implications

리뷰 작성 환경과 소비자들의 리뷰 작성 경향

학위논문(석사)--서울대학교 대학원 :경영대학 경영학과,2019. 8. 송인성.Do previous rating environments affect consumers propensity to engage in subsequent ratings? Whereas prior research has addressed the relationship between post purchase evaluation and the incidence decision of expressing opinions, little work has examined the underpinnings of the link between posted reviews and subsequent incidence decisions. Using a large dataset of restaurant reviews collected from Yelp.com, I investigate social dynamics in the opinion expression. The objective of this research is to examine the systematic link between prior and posterior reviews and reveal the factors that are associated with the aggregate number of reviews in the subsequent period. The factors affecting the consumers incidence decisions have the potential to systematically alter the compositions of opinions in the review websites. This paper examines the self-selection in the consumers decision to contribute to the online conversation by empirically identifying systematic biases in review websites by studying restaurant reviews at the content level. I present the following findings of the relationship between previous rating environments and subsequent review generation: (1) more reviews are contributed toward the restaurants with more reviews in the previous period, (2) activists contribute more reviews toward the restaurants with the fewer cumulative number of reviews in the previous period, (3) more reviews are contributed toward the restaurants with higher Yelp rating in the previous period, and (4) more reviews are contributed toward the restaurants with a shorter average length of reviews in the previous period. Overall, these results show that online reviews are disproportionately written for the specific rating environments with a consistent pattern of reviewers responding to previously posted reviews.리뷰 작성 환경이 소비자들의 리뷰 작성 경향에 영향을 미칠까? 이전 연구에서 주로 구매 후 평가와 리뷰 작성 경향에 대해 주로 다룬 반면, 작성된 리뷰들과 이후 리뷰 작성 경향에 대한 연구는 많이 이루어지지 않았다. 이 연구에서는 Yelp.com에서 수집한 대용량 리뷰 데이터를 활용하여 의견 표현 단계에서의 Social Dynamics에 대하여 연구한다. 즉, 이전 리뷰와 이후 리뷰들의 체계적인 연결 관계를 분석함으로써 리뷰 작성 경향에 영향을 미치는 사회적인 요소들을 찾아내고자 한다. 이와 같은 요소들은 리뷰 작성 경향에 영향을 미치는 것에서 더 나아가 리뷰 웹사이트 내 리뷰들의 구성 자체를 체계적으로 변경시킬 수 있다. 이 논문은 레스토랑 리뷰 데이터를 분석하여 리뷰 웹사이트 상에 작성된 총 리뷰 수의 체계적인 편향을 경험적으로 확인함으로써 소비자들이 온라인 리뷰 웹사이트 상에 기여할지 여부, 즉 의견 표출 여부를 결정하는 과정에서 발생하는 Self-selection에 대해 검토한다. 연구를 통해 리뷰 작성 환경과 리뷰 작성 경향에 대한 다음의 결과를 보였다. (1) 전체 소비자들은 이전 시점에 작성된 리뷰가 많은 레스토랑에 더 많은 리뷰를 작성한다. (2) 활동적인 소비자들은 누적 리뷰 수가 적은 레스토랑에 더 많은 리뷰를 작성한다. (3) 전체 소비자들은 누적 Yelp 평점이 높은 레스토랑에 더 많은 리뷰를 작성한다. (4) 전체 소비자들은 리뷰의 누적 평균 길이가 짧은 레스토랑에 더 많은 리뷰를 작성한다. 이러한 결과는 특정한 리뷰 작성 환경 상에서 온라인 리뷰가 더 많이 작성되며 소비자들이 기존에 작성된 리뷰에 일관적으로 반응하는 것을 나타낸다.1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. LITERATURE REVIEW 5 2.1. Social dynamics in the opinion formation phase 7 2.2. Social dynamics in the opinion expression phase 8 3. DATA 12 4. HYPOTHESIS DEVELOPMENT 15 4.1. The Effect of Review Volume on Incidence Decisions 16 4.2. The Effect of Review Valence on Incidence Decisions 21 4.3. The Effect of Review Variance on Incidence Decisions 23 4.4. The Effect of Review Length on Incidence Decisions 24 5. EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS AND RESULT 25 6. CONCLUSION 34 REFERENCES 38 APPENDIX 41 국문초록 43Maste

Driving Live Streaming Commitment with Goal Incentives Based on Viewer Reciprocity: A Quasi-Natural Experiment

Driving streaming commitment from individual streamers is critical to the sustainable growth of live streaming platforms, and platform operators tend to apply incentives to motivate streamers for such voluntary content contributions. However, most monetary incentives have an unintended impact on reducing the intrinsic motivation of streamers, resulting in fewer efforts and less commitment to streaming productions. This study explores the effect of a novel goal incentive design based on viewer reciprocal support. Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment, we estimate the causal impact of the incentive scheme using the combination of a coarsened exact matching (CEM) approach with the difference-in-differences (DID) model. Our results confirm that the goal incentive based on viewer reciprocal support could positively drive streamers’ efforts in live streaming. This paper contributes to the literature on driving user generated content in emerging digital platforms and offers important implications for streaming platform operators

Optimizing Two Sided Promotion for IS Enabled Transportation Network: A Conditional Bayesian Learning Model

This paper investigates whether taxi apps provide attribute value for taxi driver, and how two-sided sales promotion interacted with consumer learning about attribute value to influence taxi drivers’ decision of adoption of taxi app. We propose a conditional Bayesian learning model to allow learning about multiple attributes. We find the evidence of taxi driver’s learning about attribute of app, transaction successful rate and the probability of earning cash back from app provider. We also find measurable evidence that sales promotion during product introduction has indirect effect through learning

The Digital Services Tax: A Conceptual Defense

As 2018 nears its end, a digital service tax (DST) seems imminent in Europe, yet elaborations of the DST’s motivations have so far come primarily from the European Commission and the UK Treasury: academic and practitioner commentators remain largely skeptical. This paper offers a new conceptual defense of the DST that is independent of the existing government positions. I argue that a clear case can be made for the DST as a way of taxing location-specific rent earned by digital platforms. While the DST may also be partially motivated by other, potentially conflicting visions for reforming international taxation, such as destination-based apportionment or greater protection of the “source-based” taxing rights, the justification in terms of taxing location-specific rent both is distinct from and arguably offers a more compelling fit with the current policy focus of European governments than these other visions. Conceiving of the DST as a tax on location-specific rent allows principled replies to its critics. Two of the most prominent critiques point to the DST’s character as a turnover tax, and the fact it is not coordinated through the renegotiation of income tax treaties. With respect to the first critique, it can be countered that digital platforms enjoy low marginal costs of production, implying that the difference between taxing revenue and taxing profit is small. The fact that many platform companies potentially subject to the DST are in fact loss-making does not make the DST inefficient; indeed, the DST may enhance efficiency by deterring excessive entry and market fragmentation in natural monopoly contexts. With respect to the second critique, it can be argued that a tax on location specific rent requires less coordination through tax treaties since a deduction for DST paid would leave an appropriate corporate tax base for other countries. Moreover, it is unlikely that traditional profit attribution methods under tax treaties would help with the identification of location specific rent (and the consequent allocation of taxing rights). Therefore it is unclear that treaty-based coordination would improve the efficiency of the tax. A conception of the DST as a tax on location-specific rent, however, is in tension with certain specific features of the EC’s DST proposal, as well as the EC view that a “long-term solution” that relies on the concept of significant digital presence (SDP) is superior. The conceptual defense of the DST offered in this paper thus casts a new light on both sides of the debate