Structural balance emerges and explains performance in risky decision-making.

Polarization affects many forms of social organization. A key issue focuses on which affective relationships are prone to change and how their change relates to performance. In this study, we analyze a financial institutional over a two-year period that employed 66 day traders, focusing on links between changes in affective relations and trading performance. Traders' affective relations were inferred from their IMs (>2 million messages) and trading performance was measured from profit and loss statements (>1 million trades). Here, we find that triads of relationships, the building blocks of larger social structures, have a propensity towards affective balance, but one unbalanced configuration resists change. Further, balance is positively related to performance. Traders with balanced networks have the "hot hand", showing streaks of high performance. Research implications focus on how changes in polarization relate to performance and polarized states can depolarize

Business Ontology for Evaluating Corporate Social Responsibility

This paper presents a software solution that is developed to automatically classify companies by taking into account their level of social responsibility. The application is based on ontologies and on intelligent agents. In order to obtain the data needed to evaluate companies, we developed a web crawling module that analyzes the company’s website and the documents that are available online such as social responsibility report, mission statement, employment structure, etc. Based on a predefined CSR ontology, the web crawling module extracts the terms that are linked to corporate social responsibility. By taking into account the extracted qualitative data, an intelligent agent, previously trained on a set of companies, computes the qualitative values, which are then included in the classification model based on neural networks. The proposed ontology takes into consideration the guidelines proposed by the “ISO 26000 Standard for Social Responsibility”. Having this model, and being aware of the positive relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and financial performance, an overall perspective on each company’s activity can be configured, this being useful not only to the company’s creditors, auditors, stockholders, but also to its consumers.corporate social responsibility, ISO 26000 Standard for Social Responsibility, ontology, web crawling, intelligent agent, corporate performance, POS tagging, opinion mining, sentiment analysis

IS IT WORTH IT? DISMANTLING THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL MEDIA RELATED SALES PERFORMANCE

Social media platforms present unique possibilities for companies to interact with their customers and take up a key role in building relationships. A substantial body of research has demonstrated the impact of social media regarding, for example, brand awareness and corporate reputation. However, little is known concerning the financial Return on Investment from social media engagement and specific strategies to leverage it. To this end, the study draws on relationship marketing theory to develop and operationalise a research model, which understands objective firm performance in terms of sales as a result of relationship antecedents (i.e., corporate investment and dyadic similarity) mediated through the customer-perceived relationship strength. To test the assumed research model, we collect and analyse a dataset of over 1.5 million Twitter messages revolving around ten car manufacturers and measure the impact on new car registration volumes. The results of this study suggest that companies can increase their sales volume through greater relationship investment (i.e., by providing interest group-specific information) and by adopting a social media strategy that promotes the users’ relationship satisfaction (i.e., raises the share of voice within user messages)

Consumer perceptions of co-branding alliances: Organizational dissimilarity signals and brand fit

This study explores how consumers evaluate co-branding alliances between dissimilar partner firms. Customers are well aware that different firms are behind a co-branded product and observe the partner firms’ characteristics. Drawing on signaling theory, we assert that consumers use organizational characteristics as signals in their assessment of brand fit and for their purchasing decisions. Some organizational signals are beyond the control of the co-branding partners or at least they cannot alter them on short notice. We use a quasi-experimental design and test how co-branding partner dissimilarity affects brand fit perception. The results show that co-branding partner dissimilarity in terms of firm size, industry scope, and country-of-origin image negatively affects brand fit perception. Firm age dissimilarity does not exert significant influence. Because brand fit generally fosters a benevolent consumer attitude towards a co-branding alliance, the findings suggest that high partner dissimilarity may reduce overall co-branding alliance performance

Essays on Performance Implications of Social Media for Established and Nascent Firms

The possibility of large-scale communication with stakeholders brought about by social media has made these new channels of communication an important arena for spending marketing budgets. Despite the increasing share of social media in firms’ marketing budget, there is significant heterogeneity in firms’ social media communication practices even within the same venue and among firms from the same industry. As such, there is need for more research on how firms can leverage social media to achieve better performance. In order to address this broad question, two essays have been designed and executed. The first essay utilizes integrated marketing communication as the theoretical lens to explores the implications of a unique opportunity offered by social media, that is, the ability to simultaneously broadcast to the mass audience (impersonal communication) and interact with individuals (personalized communication). Using a unique dataset, which includes the tweets, as well as financial data of S&P 500 firms present on Twitter, this essay reveals that the effects of communication modes are more intricate than a sole focus on the main effects would suggest. Complementing the first essay which focuses on established firms, the second essay explores the implications of social media communication for B2B new ventures. Building on the literature on strategic similarity and dissimilarity, and comparative linguistics, this essay demonstrates that the lingual similarity of a B2B new venture’s social media communications to those of its competitors and customers, can signal important information about the venture’s marketing capabilities, thus impacting its success in fundraising

Econometrics meets sentiment : an overview of methodology and applications

The advent of massive amounts of textual, audio, and visual data has spurred the development of econometric methodology to transform qualitative sentiment data into quantitative sentiment variables, and to use those variables in an econometric analysis of the relationships between sentiment and other variables. We survey this emerging research field and refer to it as sentometrics, which is a portmanteau of sentiment and econometrics. We provide a synthesis of the relevant methodological approaches, illustrate with empirical results, and discuss useful software

Effectiveness of Corporate Social Media Activities to Increase Relational Outcomes

This study applies social media analytics to investigate the impact of different corporate social media activities on user word of mouth and attitudinal loyalty. We conduct a multilevel analysis of approximately 5 million tweets regarding the main Twitter accounts of 28 large global companies. We empirically identify different social media activities in terms of social media management strategies (using social media management tools or the web-frontend client), account types (broadcasting or receiving information), and communicative approaches (conversational or disseminative). We find positive effects of social media management tools, broadcasting accounts, and conversational communication on public perception