An Intelligent Online Shopping Guide Based On Product Review Mining

This position paper describes an on-going work on a novel recommendation framework for assisting online shoppers in choosing the most desired products, in accordance with requirements input in natural language. Existing feature-based Shopping Guidance Systems fail when the customer lacks domain expertise. This framework enables the customer to use natural language in the query text to retrieve preferred products interactively. In addition, it is intelligent enough to allow a customer to use objective and subjective terms when querying, or even the purpose of purchase, to screen out the expected products

A NOVEL FRAMEWORK BASED ON WORD-OF-MOUTH MINING FOR NON-PROSUMER DECISION SUPPORT

The deeper penetration of business-to-consumer e-commerce requires that customer decision support systems (CDSS) serve a wider range of users. However, a significant weakness of existing e-shopping assistance programs is their inability to aid non-professional consumers (non-prosumers) in buying highly differentiated products. This paper proposes a novel framework that infers product recommendations with minimal information input. At the heart of the proposed framework is the feature-usage map (FUM), a Bayesian network-based model that encodes the correlations among a product’s technical specifications and its suitability in terms of its using scenario (usage). It also incorporates a query-based lazy learning mechanism that elicits a product’s rating score from product reviews and constructs its corresponding FUM in an on-demand manner. This mechanism allows the knowledge base to be enriched incrementally, with no need for an exhaustive repository of FUMs pertaining to all possible usage queries a user may invoke. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is evaluated through an empirical user study. The results show that the framework is able to effectively derive product ratings based on specified usage. Moreover, this rating information can also be incorporated into a conventional buying guide system to deliver purchase decision support for non-prosumer

Examining the Mediating Role of Commitment on Brand Herding: An Empirical Study in a Virtual Community of Consumption

Consumer social interaction is one of the most influential factors affecting people’s consumption-related decision making (Y. Chen, Wang, & Xie, 2011). When making product choice, particularly, consumers apt to follow the action of the crowd in many circumstances (Bonabeau, 2004). Referred to as herding in literature, such behavior-based social influence among market participants has long been studied (Banerjee, 1992; Hirshleifer & Hong Teoh, 2003; Raafat, Chater, & Frith, 2009). With the rise of online social platforms, other people’s actions are getting increasingly more observable, as consumers usually share with each other their product-related use experiences, opinions, and purchase decisions (Liu, Brass, Lu, & Chen, 2015). As such, behaviorbased social influence plays a critical role in shaping and affecting consumers’ choice (Duan, Gu, & Whinston, 2009). Meanwhile, research on herd behavior has grown significantly and continues to grow. Empirical research examines herd behavior in a wide range of contexts, including online purchase (C. M. K. Cheung, Xiao, & Liu, 2014; Huang & Chen, 2006), technology adoption (Sun, 2013; Walden & Browne, 2009), online auction (Simonsohn & Ariely, 2008), contribution to open source projects (Oh & Jeon, 2007), etc. While it is generally held that no single reason can explain the behavioral convergence of consumers, literature in economics, marketing, and IS (information systems) disciplines primarily highlight two utility-based mechanisms behind herding (Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, & Welch, 1992; Y.-F. Chen, 2008; Duan et al., 2009; Huang & Chen, 2006; Langley, Hoeve, Ortt, Pals, & van der Vecht, 2014; Zhang & Liu, 2012). These mechanisms are informational cascades (i.e., ignore one’s own information and make a choice based on other’s choice due to uncertainty when making decision, see (Bikhchandani et al., 1992) and positive network externalities (i.e., additional users of a good increase the value of that good, (Kauffman, McAndrews, & Wang, 2000). Despite a wealth of literature on herd behavior, there has been little work discusses the convergent behavior occurs among customers who are already the patrons of certain brands. This setting is unique in that, available choices in the market (i.e., current brand vs. alternatives) are not in the same position from the standpoint of consumers. Empirical studies do show that the popularity of a brand, per se, positively impacts its customers’ loyalty (Raj, 1985) and favorable cost-benefit evaluation (Deval, Mantel, Kardes, & Posavac, 2013; He & Oppewal, 2018; Li, 2004). These key components, in turn, encourage the existing customers of the brand continue their patronage (Aaker, 2009). By this process, a product’s popularity establishes a hinderance to its customers’ attrition by cementing brand-customer relationship (Aaker, 2009). However, it remains uncertain how and to what extent that customers’ continuance intention (as opposed to migrating to alternative brands) is affected by the crowd’s choice. Note: in some occasions, indeed, brand popularity is negatively associated with one’s brand choice. Need for uniqueness (Tian, Bearden, & Hunter, 2001) and negative network externalities (Hellofs & Jacobson, 1999) are two common mechanisms. The former occurs primarily in the market of self-expressive products, such as luxury goods, apparels, and the like (Steinhart, Kamins, Mazursky, & Noy, 2014); whereas a typical context of the latter is that the quality of certain services being worsen off due to high service popularity (Hellofs & Jacobson, 1999). Obviously, the understanding of brand patrons’ behavioral convergence has significant implications on both theory and managerial practice. However, none of the aforementioned utility-based mechanisms of herding (i.e., informational cascades and positive network externalities) provides a satisfactory explanation in this context. One reason for this theoretical lacuna is related to the implicit assumption in the herding literature (i.e., available choices in the market are of the same position), which is not the case in the research context of business retention/switching. A second reason deals with the overwhelming emphasis on the economic utility as the underlying mechanisms. As pointed out by Bikhchandani et al. (1992), herding could also be induced by noneconomic factors, such as the decision-maker’s conformity with others (Jones, 1984), avoiding sanctions due to disobedience (Bendor & Mookherjee, 1987), and so on. Building upon the prior research on customer retention, we introduce customer commitment — the key construct in business relationship literature, into the understanding of brand patrons’ behavioral convergence. It is widely held that commitment plays the central role in people’s persistence of behavior (Newman & Sabherwal, 1996). Particularly, customer commitment involves not only the state of mind that binds a customer with the present business relationship (Kelley & Davis, 1994), but also the structural conditions that prevent her from making a change (Becker, 1960). Therefore, we contend that the perspective of commitment offers an integrative understanding of the behavioral convergence induced by both psychological and utility-based mechanisms. This research adopts the three-component commitment model (TCM) — a widely used conceptualization of commitment (Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, & Topolnytsky, 2002). According to TCM, people choose to maintain the current business relationship Tang The 18th International Conference on Electronic Business, Guilin, China, December 2-6, 2018 822 because they feel they want to (affective commitment), ought to (normative commitment), or need to (calculative commitment) (Meyer, Allen, & Smith, 1993). By introducing TCM into the study of herding phenomenon, this research takes a holistic and novel view for understanding the interplay between product popularity and consumers’ continuance. In particular, we ask, how do affective commitment, normative commitment, and calculative commitment mediate the effects of product popularity on customers intention of brand continuance? In this research, we attempt to answer the research question in the settings of virtual communities of consumption (VCC), which are online groups explicitly centered on consumption-related interests (De Valck, 2005). VCCs provide plentiful of informative cues about brands’ relative popularity and consumers’ choices (C. M. K. Cheung et al., 2014), hence constitute an ideal research environment of our study. This study potentially contributes to the literature at the following perspectives. First, despite the voluminous research on herding, it remains uncertain how group mimicking behavior affect customer retention or migration. The current research adds to the literature by expanding research on herding to a domain in which, to the best of our knowledge, very little scholarly effort has been devoted. Second and more importantly, this research theorizes and empirically tests the central role of commitment components underlying the herd behavior of brand patrons. This perspective provides insights into an alternative mechanism of how herding takes effect in the context of customer migration, thus adds to both the herding and customer retention literature. In addition, our exploration of the heterogeneous roles of various popularity cues in customer retention sheds lights on marketing practice about the most effective way to retain patrons and attract potential customers

How Does Brand Popularity Affect Patrons’ Continuance? Examining the Mediating Role of Customer Commitment

Researchers have developed a rich body of literature that examines the effect of product popularity on consumers’ choice through either economical or non-economical lens. However, there has been little work studying both two processes of consumers’ collective behavior, even though this behavior can be driven by distinct mechanisms simultaneously. Against the research context of brand switching, this research makes reference to the three-component commitment model and offers a framework that links brand popularity to customer continuance through the key mediating role of customer commitment. Drawing on cue utilization theory, I also theorize three primary brand popularity cues and investigate their nuanced effects on customer commitment and brand continuance intention. The analytical results from a popular virtual community of consumption in China show empirical evidence supporting most hypotheses. This research enriches extant literature by proposing and testing multiple mechanisms of brand-herding behavior. It also sheds light on marketing practice

Locality statistics for anomaly detection in time series of graphs

The ability to detect change-points in a dynamic network or a time series of graphs is an increasingly important task in many applications of the emerging discipline of graph signal processing. This paper formulates change-point detection as a hypothesis testing problem in terms of a generative latent position model, focusing on the special case of the Stochastic Block Model time series. We analyze two classes of scan statistics, based on distinct underlying locality statistics presented in the literature. Our main contribution is the derivation of the limiting distributions and power characteristics of the competing scan statistics. Performance is compared theoretically, on synthetic data, and on the Enron email corpus. We demonstrate that both statistics are admissible in one simple setting, while one of the statistics is inadmissible a second setting.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure

Water absorption and drying shrinkage of recycled foamed aggregate concrete

This paper presents some experimental results and discusses the used of recycled foamed aggregates as natural coarse aggregates replacement in producing concrete. The physical properties of recycled foamed aggregates concrete were investigated. The properties studied are water absorption and drying shrinkage from the concrete early ages until the periods of 56 days. The 100 mm x 100 mm cube specimen was used to study the water absorption at the age of 7, 28 and 56 days. Meanwhile, the 100 mm x 100 mm x 300 mm length prism had been casted and used for drying shrinkage test for recycled foamed aggregates concrete. The foamed aggregates was produced from crushing recycled foamed concrete blocks. It were coated with cement paste to reduce its water absorption ability during casting process. Superplasticizer was used to maintain the workability of fresh concrete with a slump vary between 50 mm to 100 mm. The physical tests were conducted on recycled foamed aggregates to determine their initial properties such as loose bulk density, sieve analysis and water absorption rate. Recycled foamed aggregate concretes were produced with varied water cement ratio. The results obtained indicated that the linear elastic relationship between water cement ratio and water absorption rate. The higher the water cement ratio of concrete specimen will obtained higher water absorption rate. Vice versa, the density is low for drying shrinkage. The water absorption decreased while drying shrinkage becomes more stabilized over curing period

The Perceptions of Macao Undergraduates Regarding Help Websites for Problem Gambling

This study conducted a web-surfing exercise and a questionnaire survey among a group of Macao undergraduate students regarding the websites that offered help with problem gambling. The results of this study found that most help websites in Macao and Hong Kong provided basic information-sharing service. The students indicated that they would choose their preferred help organization based on factors such as trust, familiarity, and the characteristics of the websites. They also gave comments/suggestions related to the publicity, design, contents, and focus of the websites. This study discussed the results and their implications for future research and practice