49 research outputs found
The Structural Importance of Consumer Networks
This dissertation contains three essays that investigate how a consumer’s social network position (i.e., a person’s location within a web of relationships) plays an important role in the way that consumer influences and exchanges information with others. Using social capital theory as the conceptual framework, I demonstrate that a consumer’s location within a network (network centrality) has an effect on their ability to influence others and, conversely, on others’ ability to influence them. I also show that network positions influence the type of information that is sought from others (information about the self or information about others). Moreover, I demonstrate that people’s perceptions of their own social capital may not coincide with their actual stores of social capital, revealing how this discrepancy may yield certain social benefits and social costs. Together, the findings of this research contribute to our understanding of consumer networks and further emphasize the relevance and importance of social network positions and social capital. Essay 1 provides a framework for understanding the association between network centrality and the flow of consumer influence. Overall, people see themselves as opinion leaders when they perceive that they are central (i.e., popular) within their networks. However, these self-assessments are sometimes at odds with the perceptions of the rest of the network members. Counter-intuitively, the findings demonstrate that consumers who perceive themselves to be central in networks are quite susceptible to the influence of others. Essay 2 further extends the investigation of network centrality to information-seeking behavior. The results demonstrate that network centrality is positively related to a consumer’s rate of seeking information from other network members. Interestingly, people occupying degree central positions tend to seek information about their own consumer behavior (i.e., feedback), while people occupying betweenness central positions tend to seek information about the behavior of other consumers. Finally, Essay 3 focuses on the instrumental and detrimental role of the individual’s materialism in social network development. Based on an experimental study and a separate longitudinal field study of a social network, I demonstrate that materialistic consumers are susceptible to a perceptual network fallacy (a mismatch between individuals’ perceptions of their social networks versus their actual social networks, as rated by others) over time. Results from the longitudinal field study demonstrate that materialistic individuals overestimated the number of friends they had in their social networks in two separate time periods. Further, materialistic individuals overestimated the growth of their social networks over time. A follow-up experimental study reveals that materialistic consumers overestimated the extent to which others desired to develop friendships with them. Using the latest social network analysis techniques, I demonstrate the unique advantages and disadvantages of occupying central positions in social networks
DISAGGREGATED EFFECTS OF COMPUTER MEDIATED COMMUNICATION USAGE PATTERNS ON SOCIAL NETWORKS
Various studies have reported that computer-mediated communication (CMC) increases, decreases and has no effect on social capital. These conflicting outcomes of CMC on social ties resulted in a rich debate. However, the core question remains unanswered - how does usage of CMC disrupt relationships and make individuals isolated but at the same time function as a channel for creating new and enduring social ties within and across the populations? We measure CMC usage for learning activities, leisure and socializing communications, and entertainment purpose. We find that those who use CMC more for entertainment have less developed social networks irrespective of the contexts we studied. Those who use CMC for leisure and socializing communication have well developed broader social networks and close friendships networks but less developed work networks. Finally, those who use CMC more for learning activities are more central in work networks but less central in broader social networks and close friendship networks
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Virtual Reality and Implications for Destination Marketing
Virtual Reality and Implications for Destination Marketing
Abstract
This study considers the impact of Virtual Reality (VR) in affecting destination image. Three groups viewed related promotional content on South Africa as either a website, a 2D Video, or an immersive VR video using a head mounted display. Participants were asked questions relating to destination image and advertisement effectiveness. Results show that VR positively impacted affective destination image, as well as most items within conative destination image and advertisement effectiveness. Practitioners should consider using VR to visually promote their destinations and experiences, as participants did generally feel more positive emotions towards the destination, and were more likely to share their experiences about the destination and the advertisement itself with friends and relatives
NICE 2023 Zero-shot Image Captioning Challenge
In this report, we introduce NICE
project\footnote{\url{https://nice.lgresearch.ai/}} and share the results and
outcomes of NICE challenge 2023. This project is designed to challenge the
computer vision community to develop robust image captioning models that
advance the state-of-the-art both in terms of accuracy and fairness. Through
the challenge, the image captioning models were tested using a new evaluation
dataset that includes a large variety of visual concepts from many domains.
There was no specific training data provided for the challenge, and therefore
the challenge entries were required to adapt to new types of image descriptions
that had not been seen during training. This report includes information on the
newly proposed NICE dataset, evaluation methods, challenge results, and
technical details of top-ranking entries. We expect that the outcomes of the
challenge will contribute to the improvement of AI models on various
vision-language tasks.Comment: Tech report, project page https://nice.lgresearch.ai
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Global burden of 288 causes of death and life expectancy decomposition in 204 countries and territories and 811 subnational locations, 1990–2021: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021
BACKGROUND Regular, detailed reporting on population health by underlying cause of death is fundamental for public health decision making. Cause-specific estimates of mortality and the subsequent effects on life expectancy worldwide are valuable metrics to gauge progress in reducing mortality rates. These estimates are particularly important following large-scale mortality spikes, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. When systematically analysed, mortality rates and life expectancy allow comparisons of the consequences of causes of death globally and over time, providing a nuanced understanding of the effect of these causes on global populations. METHODS The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2021 cause-of-death analysis estimated mortality and years of life lost (YLLs) from 288 causes of death by age-sex-location-year in 204 countries and territories and 811 subnational locations for each year from 1990 until 2021. The analysis used 56 604 data sources, including data from vital registration and verbal autopsy as well as surveys, censuses, surveillance systems, and cancer registries, among others. As with previous GBD rounds, cause-specific death rates for most causes were estimated using the Cause of Death Ensemble model-a modelling tool developed for GBD to assess the out-of-sample predictive validity of different statistical models and covariate permutations and combine those results to produce cause-specific mortality estimates-with alternative strategies adapted to model causes with insufficient data, substantial changes in reporting over the study period, or unusual epidemiology. YLLs were computed as the product of the number of deaths for each cause-age-sex-location-year and the standard life expectancy at each age. As part of the modelling process, uncertainty intervals (UIs) were generated using the 2·5th and 97·5th percentiles from a 1000-draw distribution for each metric. We decomposed life expectancy by cause of death, location, and year to show cause-specific effects on life expectancy from 1990 to 2021. We also used the coefficient of variation and the fraction of population affected by 90% of deaths to highlight concentrations of mortality. Findings are reported in counts and age-standardised rates. Methodological improvements for cause-of-death estimates in GBD 2021 include the expansion of under-5-years age group to include four new age groups, enhanced methods to account for stochastic variation of sparse data, and the inclusion of COVID-19 and other pandemic-related mortality-which includes excess mortality associated with the pandemic, excluding COVID-19, lower respiratory infections, measles, malaria, and pertussis. For this analysis, 199 new country-years of vital registration cause-of-death data, 5 country-years of surveillance data, 21 country-years of verbal autopsy data, and 94 country-years of other data types were added to those used in previous GBD rounds. FINDINGS The leading causes of age-standardised deaths globally were the same in 2019 as they were in 1990; in descending order, these were, ischaemic heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lower respiratory infections. In 2021, however, COVID-19 replaced stroke as the second-leading age-standardised cause of death, with 94·0 deaths (95% UI 89·2-100·0) per 100 000 population. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted the rankings of the leading five causes, lowering stroke to the third-leading and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease to the fourth-leading position. In 2021, the highest age-standardised death rates from COVID-19 occurred in sub-Saharan Africa (271·0 deaths [250·1-290·7] per 100 000 population) and Latin America and the Caribbean (195·4 deaths [182·1-211·4] per 100 000 population). The lowest age-standardised death rates from COVID-19 were in the high-income super-region (48·1 deaths [47·4-48·8] per 100 000 population) and southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania (23·2 deaths [16·3-37·2] per 100 000 population). Globally, life expectancy steadily improved between 1990 and 2019 for 18 of the 22 investigated causes. Decomposition of global and regional life expectancy showed the positive effect that reductions in deaths from enteric infections, lower respiratory infections, stroke, and neonatal deaths, among others have contributed to improved survival over the study period. However, a net reduction of 1·6 years occurred in global life expectancy between 2019 and 2021, primarily due to increased death rates from COVID-19 and other pandemic-related mortality. Life expectancy was highly variable between super-regions over the study period, with southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania gaining 8·3 years (6·7-9·9) overall, while having the smallest reduction in life expectancy due to COVID-19 (0·4 years). The largest reduction in life expectancy due to COVID-19 occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean (3·6 years). Additionally, 53 of the 288 causes of death were highly concentrated in locations with less than 50% of the global population as of 2021, and these causes of death became progressively more concentrated since 1990, when only 44 causes showed this pattern. The concentration phenomenon is discussed heuristically with respect to enteric and lower respiratory infections, malaria, HIV/AIDS, neonatal disorders, tuberculosis, and measles. INTERPRETATION Long-standing gains in life expectancy and reductions in many of the leading causes of death have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the adverse effects of which were spread unevenly among populations. Despite the pandemic, there has been continued progress in combatting several notable causes of death, leading to improved global life expectancy over the study period. Each of the seven GBD super-regions showed an overall improvement from 1990 and 2021, obscuring the negative effect in the years of the pandemic. Additionally, our findings regarding regional variation in causes of death driving increases in life expectancy hold clear policy utility. Analyses of shifting mortality trends reveal that several causes, once widespread globally, are now increasingly concentrated geographically. These changes in mortality concentration, alongside further investigation of changing risks, interventions, and relevant policy, present an important opportunity to deepen our understanding of mortality-reduction strategies. Examining patterns in mortality concentration might reveal areas where successful public health interventions have been implemented. Translating these successes to locations where certain causes of death remain entrenched can inform policies that work to improve life expectancy for people everywhere. FUNDING Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Embodied cognition and social consumption: elf-regulating temperature through social products and behaviors
Extant embodied cognition research suggests that individuals can reduce a perceived lack of interpersonal warmth by substituting physicalwarmth, and vice versa. We suggest that this behavior is self-regulatory in nature and that this self-regulation can be accomplished via consumptivebehavior. Experiment 1 found that consumers perceived ambient temperature to be significantly lower when eating alone compared to eating with apartner. Experiment 2 found that consuming a cool (vs. warm) drink led individuals to generate more socially-oriented attributes for a hypotheticalproduct. Experiment 3 found that physically cooler individuals desired a social consumption setting, whereas physically warmer individualsdesired a lone consumption setting. We interpret these results within the context of self-regulation, such that perceived physical temperaturedeviations from a steady state unconsciously motivate the individual to find bodily balance in order to alleviate that deviation