Identifying Product Defects from User Complaints: A Probabilistic Defect Model

The recent surge in using social media has created a massive amount of unstructured textual complaints about products and services. However, discovering potential product defects from large amounts of unstructured text is a nontrivial task. In this paper, we develop a probabilistic defect model (PDM) that identifies the most critical product issues and corresponding product attributes, simultaneously. We facilitate domain-oriented key attributes (e.g., product model, year of production, defective components, symptoms, etc.) of a product to identify and acquire integral information of defect. We conduct comprehensive evaluations including quantitative evaluations and qualitative evaluations to ensure the quality of discovered information. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms existing unsupervised method (K-Means Clustering), and could find more valuable information. Our research has significant managerial implications for mangers, manufacturers, and policy makers

A Domain Oriented LDA Model for Mining Product Defects from Online Customer Reviews

Online reviews provide important demand-side knowledge for product manufacturers to improve product quality. However, discovering and quantifying potential products’ defects from large amounts of online reviews is a nontrivial task. In this paper, we propose a Latent Product Defect Mining model that identifies critical product defects. We define domain-oriented key attributes, such as components and keywords used to describe a defect, and build a novel LDA model to identify and acquire integral information about product defects. We conduct comprehensive evaluations including quantitative and qualitative evaluations to ensure the quality of discovered information. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the standard LDA model, and could find more valuable information. Our research contributes to the extant product quality analytics literature and has significant managerial implications for researchers, policy makers, customers, and practitioners

The Easy Case for Products Liability: A Response to Polinsky & Shavell

In their article “The Uneasy Case for Product Liability,” Professors Polinsky and Shavell assert the extraordinary claim that there should be no tort liability - none at all - for injuries caused by widely-sold products. In particular, they claim to have found convincing evidence that the threat of tort liability creates no additional incentives to safety beyond those already provided by regulatory agencies and market forces, and that tort compensation adds little or no benefit to injury victims beyond the compensation already provided by various forms of insurance. In this response, we explain that, even on its own narrow terms, “Uneasy,” comes nowhere near to demonstrating what it purports to demonstrate. We also identify various “benefits” provided by tort liability for product-related injuries that Polinsky and Shavell entirely fail to consider. In fact, the case for some form of products liability - whether fault-based or defect-based - is really quite easy