Image or Text: Which One is More Influential? A Deep-learning Approach for Visual and Textual Data Analysis in the Digital Economy

In a digital economy, different types of information about products communicate their quality and characteristics to prospective consumers. However, it remains unclear which type of information plays the most important role in individuals’ decision-making processes. In this study, we explore the effect that unstructured data has on and the importance of congruence between textual and visual data in consumers’ purchase decisions. We apply a deep neural network model to rank the importance of different information types and use a regression model to investigate the impact that information consistency has on sales predictions. Based on our empirical analysis, we found that both image-based and text-based information influenced consumers’ purchase decisions but that the former influenced their purchase decisions about “search goods” more and that the latter influenced their purchase decisions about “experience goods” more. Furthermore, congruence between image- and text-based information was positively associated with purchase decisions, which indicates that information congruence impacts products’ sales performance in the digital economy. In this study, we also demonstrate how to apply advanced deep-learning techniques to measure the congruence between different information types

An examination of online ratings on hotel performance indicators: An analysis of the Boston hotel market

This research study is designed to examine the impact that a posted online review rating has on the financial performance of a hotel room in the lodging industry. The popularity ratings of hotels in the Boston, Massachusetts market, as posted on the popular online travel review website TripAdvisor, will be examined against the hotel performance metrics of average daily rate (ADR), occupancy, and Revenue per Available Room (RevPar). This study examines the literature to better understand the previous research behind the impact that word-of-mouth communication, both in traditional and electronic forms, has on customer satisfaction. The emergence of social technologies has created an environment in which businesses can be rated and reviewed in an open market for potential future customers to read, and the development of user-generated content has become a more trusted and credible source of product and service information. The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of these online ratings on hotel performance, specifically that of TripAdvisor rating attributes on the financial performance of a hotel. The study found that the various attributes had varying levels of significant impact on Average Daily Rate (ADR), Occupancy, and Revenue per Available Room (RevPar). Based on the natures of the lodging properties in Boston, Value was found to be statistically significant across all categories analyzed. Ultimately, the contribution of this research is both academic and practical, as this study will be among the first to examine and test the various TripAdvisor rating attributes on each hotel financial performance metric. In addition, this study will expand upon the current body of knowledge in the areas of user-generated content, online reviews, ratings of TripAdvisor, and electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM)

Please, talk about it! When hotel popularity boosts preferences

Many consumers post on-line reviews, affecting the average evaluation of products and services. Yet, little is known about the importance of the number of reviews for consumer decision making. We conducted an on-line experiment (n= 168) to assess the joint impact of the average evaluation, a measure of quality, and the number of reviews, a measure of popularity, on hotel preference. The results show that consumers' preference increases with the number of reviews, independently of the average evaluation being high or low. This is not what one would expect from an informational point of view, and review websites fail to take this pattern into account. This novel result is mediated by demographics: young people, and in particular young males, are less affected by popularity, relying more on quality. We suggest the adoption of appropriate ranking mechanisms to fit consumer preferences. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd

Matchmakers or tastemakers? Platformization of cultural intermediation & social media’s engines for ‘making up taste’

There are long-standing practices and processes that have traditionally mediated between the processes of production and consumption of cultural content. The prominent instances of these are: curating content by identifying and selecting cultural content in order to promote to a particular set of audiences; measuring audience behaviours to construct knowledge about their tastes; and guiding audiences through recommendations from cultural experts. These cultural intermediation processes are currently being transformed, and social media platforms play important roles in this transformation. However, their role is often attributed to the work of users and/or recommendation algorithms. Thus, the processes through which data about users’ taste are aggregated and made ready for algorithmic processing are largely neglected. This study takes this problematic as an important gap in our understanding of social media platforms’ role in the transformation of cultural intermediation. To address this gap, the notion of platformization is used as a theoretical lens to examine the role of users and algorithms as part of social media’s distinct data-based sociotechnical configuration, which is built on the so-called ‘platform-logic’. Based on a set of conceptual ideas and the findings derived through a single case study on a music discovery platform, this thesis developed a framework to explain ‘platformization of cultural intermediation’. This framework outlines how curation, guidance, and measurement processes are ‘plat-formed’ in the course of development and optimisation of a social media platform. This is the main contribution of the thesis. The study also contributes to the literature by developing the concept of social media’s engines for ‘making up taste’. This concept illuminates how social media operate as sociotechnical cultural intermediaries and participates in tastemaking in ways that acquire legitimacy from the long-standing trust in the objectivity of classification, quantification, and measurement processes

Social Bootstrapping: How Pinterest and Last.fm Social Communities Benefit by Borrowing Links from Facebook

How does one develop a new online community that is highly engaging to each user and promotes social interaction? A number of websites offer friend-finding features that help users bootstrap social networks on the website by copying links from an established network like Facebook or Twitter. This paper quantifies the extent to which such social bootstrapping is effective in enhancing a social experience of the website. First, we develop a stylised analytical model that suggests that copying tends to produce a giant connected component (i.e., a connected community) quickly and preserves properties such as reciprocity and clustering, up to a linear multiplicative factor. Second, we use data from two websites, Pinterest and Last.fm, to empirically compare the subgraph of links copied from Facebook to links created natively. We find that the copied subgraph has a giant component, higher reciprocity and clustering, and confirm that the copied connections see higher social interactions. However, the need for copying diminishes as users become more active and influential. Such users tend to create links natively on the website, to users who are more similar to them than their Facebook friends. Our findings give new insights into understanding how bootstrapping from established social networks can help engage new users by enhancing social interactivity.Comment: Proc. 23rd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 201

Why Do People Adopt, or Reject, Smartphone Password Managers?

People use weak passwords for a variety of reasons, the most prescient of these being memory load and inconvenience. The motivation to choose weak passwords is even more compelling on Smartphones because entering complex passwords is particularly time consuming and arduous on small devices. Many of the memory- and inconvenience-related issues can be ameliorated by using a password manager app. Such an app can generate, remember and automatically supply passwords to websites and other apps on the phone. Given this potential, it is unfortunate that these applications have not enjoyed widespread adoption. We carried out a study to find out why this was so, to investigate factors that impeded or encouraged password manager adoption. We found that a number of factors mediated during all three phases of adoption: searching, deciding and trialling. The study’s findings will help us to market these tools more effectively in order to encourage future adoption of password managers

Identifying the influential spreaders in multilayer interactions of online social networks

Online social networks (OSNs) portray a multi-layer of interactions through which users become a friend, information is propagated, ideas are shared, and interaction is constructed within an OSN. Identifying the most influential spreaders in a network is a significant step towards improving the use of existing resources to speed up the spread of information for application such as viral marketing or hindering the spread of information for application like virus blocking and rumor restraint. Users communications facilitated by OSNs could confront the temporal and spatial limitations of traditional communications in an exceptional way, thereby presenting new layers of social interactions, which coincides and collaborates with current interaction layers to redefine the multiplex OSN. In this paper, the effects of different topological network structure on influential spreaders identification are investigated. The results analysis concluded that improving the accuracy of influential spreaders identification in OSNs is not only by improving identification algorithms but also by developing a network topology that represents the information diffusion well. Moreover, in this paper a topological representation for an OSN is proposed which takes into accounts both multilayers interactions as well as overlaying links as weight. The measurement results are found to be more reliable when the identification algorithms are applied to proposed topological representation compared when these algorithms are applied to single layer representations

Identifying the topic-specific influential users in Twitter

Social Influence can be described as the ability to have an effect on the thoughts or actions of others. Influential members in online communities are becoming the new media to market products and sway opinions. Also, their guidance and recommendations can save some people the search time and assist their selective decision making. The objective of this research is to detect the influential users in a specific topic on Twitter. In more detail, from a collection of tweets matching a specified query, we want to detect the influential users, in an online fashion. In order to address this objective, we first want to focus our search on the individuals who write in their personal accounts, so we investigate how we can differentiate between the personal and non-personal accounts. Secondly, we investigate which set of features can best lead us to the topic-specific influential users, and how these features can be expressed in a model to produce a ranked list of influential users. Finally, we look into the use of the language and if it can be used as a supporting feature for detecting the author\u27s influence. In order to decide on how to differentiate between the personal and non-personal accounts, we compared between the effectiveness of using SVM and using a manually assembled list of the non-personal accounts. In order to decide on the features that can best lead us to the influential users, we ran a few experiments on a set of features inspired from the literature. Two ranking methods were then developed, using feature combinations, to identify the candidate users for being influential. For evaluation we manually examined the users, looking at their tweets and profile page in order to decide on their influence. To address our final objective, we ran a few experiments to investigate if the SLM could be used to identify the influential users\u27 tweets. For user account classification into personal and non-personal accounts, the SVM was found to be domain independent, reliable and consistent with a precision of over 0.9. The results showed that over time the list performance deteriorates and when the domain of the test data was changed, the SVM performed better than the list with higher precision and specificity values. We extracted eight independent features from a set of 12, and ran experiments on these eight and found that the best features at identifying influential users to be the Followers count, the Average Retweets count, The Average Retweets Frequency and the Age_Activity combination. Two ranking methods were developed and tested on a set of tweets retrieved using a specific query. In the first method, these best four features were combined in different ways. The best combination was the one that took the average of the Followers count and the Average Retweets count, producing a precision at 10 value of 0.9. In the second method, the users were ranked according to the eight independent features and the top 50 users of each were included in separate lists. The users were then ranked according to their appearance frequency in these lists. The best result was obtained when we considered the users who appeared in six or more of the lists, which resulted in a precision of 1.0. Both ranking methods were then conducted on 20 different collections of retrieved tweets to verify their effectiveness in detecting influential users, and to compare their performance. The best result was obtained by the second method, for the set of users who appeared in six or more of the lists, with the highest precision mean of 0.692. Finally, for the SLM, we found a correlation between the users\u27 average Retweets counts and their tweets\u27 perplexity values, which consolidates the hypothesis that SLM can be trained to detect the highly retweeted tweets. However, the use of the perplexity for identifying influential users resulted in very low precision values. The contributions of this thesis can be summarized into the following. A method to classify the personal accounts was proposed. The features that help detecting influential users were identified to be the Followers count, the Average Retweets count, the Average Retweet Frequency and the Age_Activity combination. Two methods for identifying the influential users were proposed. Finally, the simplistic approach using SLM did not produce good results, and there is still a lot of work to be done for the SLM to be used for identifying influential users