New Product Diffusion: A Dual Word-Of-Mouth Perspective

Word-of-Mouth plays its great important role on the base of social network in affecting consumers’ shopping behaviour. However, it is little known how firms make a self-suitable marketing strategy according to both online and offline WOM effect in their product diffusion. This article investigates a new product diffusion process taking both offline WOM and online WOM effect into consideration. Specifically, we compare three marketing strategies by predicting product diffusion level during its product life cycle and assist managers to improve cost efficiency. The findings indicate that product peak sales rate and cumulative sales at peak time would be highest when managers market their products only through the Internet. However, product peak adopting time is not determined by the strategy which the manager takes but impacted by the relationship between coefficients. Parameter analysis is further provided to extract more managerial insights

Comprehension of online consumer-generated product review: a construal level perspective

This study explores how consumers, who differ in their psychological distance toward the purchasing event (i.e., temporal distance) or toward product review writers (i.e., social distance), comprehend concrete or abstract reviews. Two experiments were conducted. The first experiment examined how a consumer’s perception of temporal distance, near future or distant future, would affect his/her comprehension of product reviews of varying abstractness. Results reveal that consumers of near temporal distance perceive concrete reviews to be more helpful. These consumers express a higher recall ability compared to counterparts of distant temporal distance. However, consumers of near temporal distance perceive abstract reviews to be less helpful and express a lower recall ability compared to those of distant temporal distance. The second experiment investigated how social distance, i.e., whether the review is written by someone who is perceived to be socially close to the reader would influence his/her comprehension of product reviews of varying abstractness. Results indicate that, with the provision of concrete reviews, consumers perceive non-significant difference of the review helpfulness under near and distant social distance and exhibit comparable recall ability. With the provision of abstract reviews, however, consumers of a near social distance recognize the reviews as helpful and recall the product better than did those of a distant social distance. This study presents a theoretically-driven and empirically-validated proposition to improve the presentation of product reviews to aid consumer review comprehension

Effect of Online Brand Community on Customer Behavior Exploration: Reconciling Mixed Findings via Regulatory Focus Theory

This study seeks to address the mixed findings of prior studies regarding the effect of online brand community on customer behavior. Based on the regulatory focus theory, we hypothesize that participation in a brand community tends to increase both visit and purchase frequencies of customers with promotion-focus; on the contrary, the same would typically decrease visit and purchase frequencies of customers with prevention-focus. By analyzing data from an online brand community using a “propensity-score matching” technique, we found a partial validation that attendance of the community led to increases in customer visit frequency for customers with both promotion-focus and prevention-focus. Further, our results show that customers with promotion-focus tend to purchase more; while customers with prevention-focus slightly decreased their purchase volume. Both theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed in the paper

Impacts of Live Chat on Refund Intention: Evidence from an Online Labor Market

Live chat plays a significant role in online labor markets, which mitigates the information asymmetry caused by the highly customized nature of service products. This study examines the impacts of live chat on refund intention in online labor markets and how these impacts are moderated by business familiarity. We collect unique archived data from a leading online labor market in Asia and hypothesize that reply speed has a negative effect on refund intention while both politeness intensity and sentiment intensity have a U-shaped effect on refund intention. In addition, these effects are proposed to be weakened by business familiarity formed by previous transaction experience. The study not only offers theoretical contributions to the online labor market literature by providing empirical insights on the impact of live chat on refund intention but also yields managerial implications for service providers and platform operators

One Point is All You Need: Directional Attention Point for Feature Learning

We present a novel attention-based mechanism for learning enhanced point features for tasks such as point cloud classification and segmentation. Our key message is that if the right attention point is selected, then "one point is all you need" -- not a sequence as in a recurrent model and not a pre-selected set as in all prior works. Also, where the attention point is should be learned, from data and specific to the task at hand. Our mechanism is characterized by a new and simple convolution, which combines the feature at an input point with the feature at its associated attention point. We call such a point a directional attention point (DAP), since it is found by adding to the original point an offset vector that is learned by maximizing the task performance in training. We show that our attention mechanism can be easily incorporated into state-of-the-art point cloud classification and segmentation networks. Extensive experiments on common benchmarks such as ModelNet40, ShapeNetPart, and S3DIS demonstrate that our DAP-enabled networks consistently outperform the respective original networks, as well as all other competitive alternatives, including those employing pre-selected sets of attention points