Use of heterogeneous data sources : three case studies

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1989.Title as it appears in the M.I.T. Graduate List, June 1989: Integration of heterogeneous data sources--three case studies.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 159).by David Bradley Godes.M.S

Flying to Quality: Cultural Influences on Online Reviews

Customers increasingly consult opinions expressed online before making their final decisions. However, inherent factors such as culture may moderate the criteria and the weights individuals use to form their expectations and evaluations. Therefore, not all opinions expressed online match customers’ personal preferences, neither can firms use this information to deduce general conclusions. Our study explores this issue in the context of airline services using Hofstede’s framework as a theoretical anchor. We gauge the effect of each dimension as well as that of cultural distance between the passenger and the airline on the overall satisfaction with the flight as well as specific service factors. Using topic modeling, we also capture the effect of culture on review text and identify factors that are not captured by conventional rating scales. Our results provide significant insights for airline managers about service factors that affect more passengers from specific cultures leading to higher satisfaction/dissatisfaction

Commentary--Invited Comment on "Opinion Leadership and Social Contagion in New Product Diffusion"

No abstract available.diffusion of innovations, opinion leadership, social contagion, social networks

Contracting Under Endogenous Risk

Agents make decisions by trading off cost, return and risk. The literature, however, does not consider the impact of risk on action choice. We show that this tradeoff has important implications for the firm. First, the firm may provide no insurance in the salary. Since the agent’s action choice will determine her risk, the salary cannot compensate her for it. Second, the firm may not be able to design an incentive scheme to implement particularly risky actions. Finally, the firm may not be able to design a scheme in which the agent splits her effort across multiple tasks. This is particularly problematic for tasks that are technological substitutes. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2004incentives, compensation, agency theory, sales force management,

Se servir des conversations en ligne pour étudier le bouche-à-oreille

International audienceLes managers s'intéressent beaucoup au phénomène du bouche-à-oreille car ils pensent que le succès d'un produit est lié au bouche-à-oreille qu'il génère. Cependant, l'étude de ce phénomène se heurte à au moins trois obstacles. Tout d'abord, comment recueillir les données ? Les informations étant échangées dans un cadre privé, l'observation directe est habituellement difficile à réaliser. Deuxièmement, quel aspect de ces conversations faut-il mesurer ? Le troisième obstacle est lié au caractère non exogène du bouche-à-oreille. La prévision des ventes futures à partir du bouche-à-oreille est un procédé très utile à l'entreprise. Cela dit, il faut également prendre en compte le fait que le bouche-à-oreille est un effet des ventes passées. Notre premier objectif est de lever ces obstacles. Notre contexte d'étude concerne de nouvelles séries télévisées diffusées entre 1999 et 2000. La source des conversations interpersonnelles est le site Usenet, regroupant des milliers de forums de discussion à propos de sujets divers. Nous estimons que les conversations en ligne représentent un moyen facile et peu coûteux pour mesurer le phénomène de bouche-à-oreille. Nous montrons qu'une mesure de dispersion des conversations au sein des communautés virtuelles est un bon facteur explicatif dans le cadre d'une modélisation dynamique des audiences télévisées

Using Online Conversations to Study Word of Mouth Communication

Managers are very interested in word-of-mouth communication because it can have a tremendous impact on a product's sales. However, there are at least three significant challenges associated with measuring word of mouth. It is our primary objective in this paper to address these challenges. First and foremost, how does one even gather the data? Since the information is exchanged in private conversations, direct observation is (or at least has traditionally been) quite difficult. Second, even if one could observe the conversations, what aspect of them should one measure? The third challenge comes from the fact that word of mouth is not exogenous. While the mapping from word of mouth to future sales is of great interest to the firm, we must also recognize that word of mouth is at the same time an outcome of past sales. Our core result is that on-line conversations may offer an easy and cost-effective opportunity to measure word-of-mouth. However, simply counting on-line conversations may not be informative. On the other hand, measuring the "dispersion" of these conversations across communities is. Specifically, we show that a measure of dispersion has explanatory power in a dynamic model of sales, while pure counts do not. As a context for our study, we have chosen new TV shows during the 1999/2000 seasons. Our source of word-of-mouth conversations is Usenet, a collection of thousands of newsgroups with very diverse topics.