Frontiers: Polarized America: From political polarization to preference polarization

In light of the widely discussed political divide and increasing societal polariza-tion, we investigate in this paper whether the polarization of political ideology extends to consumers’ preferences, intentions, and purchases. Using three different data sets—the publicly available social media data of over three million brand followerships of Twitter users, a YouGov brand-preference survey data set, and Nielsen scanner panel data—we assess the evolution of brand-preference polarization. We find that the apparent polarization in political ideologies after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 stretches further to the daily lives of consumers. We observe increased polarization in preferences, behavioral intentions, and actual purchase decisions for consumer brands. Consistent with compensa-tory consumption theory, we find that the increase in polarization following the election of Donald Trump was stronger for liberals relative to conservatives, and that this asymmetric polarization is driven by consumers’ demand for “Democratic brands” rather than the sup-ply of such brands. From a brand perspective, there is evidence that brands that took a political stance observed a shift in their customer base in terms of their customers’ political affiliation. We provide publicly available (http://www.social-listening.org) access to the unique Twitter-based brand political affiliation scores

The polarity of online reviews: prevalence, drivers and implications

In this research, the authors investigate the prevalence, robustness, and possible reasons underlying the polarity of online review distributions, with the majority of the reviews at the positive end of the rating scale, a few reviews in the midrange, and some reviews at the negative end of the scale. Compiling a large data set of online reviews—over 280 million reviews from 25 major online platforms—the authors find that most reviews on most platforms exhibit a high degree of polarity, but the platforms vary in the degree of polarity on the basis of how selective customers are in reviewing products on the platform. Using cross-platform and multimethod analyses, including secondary data, experiments, and survey data, the authors empirically confirm polarity self-selection, described as the higher tendency of consumers with extreme evaluations to provide a review as an important driver of the polarity of review distributions. In addition, they describe and demonstrate that polarity self-selection and the polarity of the review distribution reduce the informativeness of online reviews

Sharing Is Caring -Is This True Or What Else Explains the Tremendous Growth of the Sharing Economy?

Although the 'sharing economy' is growing at an enormous pace, research regarding the individual needs that drive this trend is still scarce. Therefore, our study aims at a comprehensive identification of the different needs pursued with sharing. We identify sixteen needs and, moreover, demonstrate differences between different sharing platforms

The weekend effect in online reviews and what Eleanor Rigby has to do with it

In other disciplines, weekend effects are already known and well-researched. In healthcare, the weekend effect states that there are higher mortality rates for patients admitted to hospitals during the weekend (Ricciardi et al. 2014). In Finance, the weekend effect states that stock returns are lower on Mondays than on the previous Friday (Cross 1973). Our main contribution lies in proving the robust existence of a weekend effect in Marketing across different datasets of online reviews, as well as providing explanations for it. Human decision-making can be prone to influences from externalities that seem far from obvious. For example, judges judge differently depending on how far away they are from their lunch break (Danziger, Levav and Avnaim-Pesso 2011). Also pleasant or unpleasant weather conditions influence the degree of hedonic consumption (Govind, Garg and Mittal 2020). And in general, even subtle external cues (e.g., the color orange being more prominent around Halloween) can often strongly influence behavior (Dijksterhuis et al. 2005; Berger and Fitzsimmons 2008). This also holds for online review behavior as shown by Brandes and Dover (2022), who found that bad weather reduces online rating scores for past consumption behavior. We follow their call for research about additional situational factors influencing eWOM, with a special focus on the “when question” (i.e., the time a review is written). The identification of social influence in online reviews is important because they have been shown to influence our decision-making in various contexts and even have an effect on sales (You et al. 2015; Babić Rosario 2016). We find consistent and robust evidence that there is a weekend effect in online reviews: Incoming online reviews are significantly worse on a weekend than they are during the week. Our aim in this paper is twofold. First, we establish the weekend effect of reviews and demonstrate that it is robust across online platforms and second, we investigate causes that lead to this phenomenon. We test multiple alternative explanations empirically across different online review datasets, and also add additional evidence from a text analysis as well as evidence from a survey. We show that a) during the weekend different individuals or consumers review (i.e., consumers with less friends) and b) the size of the weekend effect is contingent on social aspects of the business/product being reviewed

Who will share Fake-News on Twitter? Psycholinguistic cues in online post histories discriminate Between actors in the misinformation ecosystem

The spread of misinformation or fake-news is a global concern that undermines progress on issues such as protecting democracy and public health. Past research aiming to combat its spread has largely focused on identifying its semantic content and media outlets publishing such news. In contrast, we aim to identify individuals who are more likely to share fake-news by studying the language of actors in the fake-news ecosystem (such as fake-news sharers, fact-check sharers and random twitter users), and creating a linguistic profile of them. Fake-news sharers and fact-check sharers use significantly more high-arousal negative emotions in their language, but fake-news sharers express more existentially-based needs than other actors. Incorporating psycholinguistic cues as inferred from their tweets into a model of socio-demographic predictors considerably improves classification accuracy of fake-news sharers. The finding that fake-news sharers differ in important ways from other actors in the fake-news ecosystem (such as in their existential needs), but are also similar to them in other ways (such as in their anger levels), highlights the importance of studying the entire fake-news ecosystem to increase accuracy in identification and prediction. Our approach can help mitigate fake-news sharing by enabling platforms to pre-emptively screen potential fake-news sharers' posts.Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures and 6 table

The impact of internal communication quality on employees’ attitudes and behavior towards the organization – A cross-cultural study

The increasing cultural diversity within companies around the globe makes it more important than ever to understand the influence that geographical and cultural differences have on key managerial factors. This paper contributes to existing cross-cultural research by investigating the impact of internal communication quality on employees´ attitudes and behavior towards the organization in a cross-cultural setting. A structural equation model is tested using survey data from a global logistics company. The results show how the effect of internal communication quality on employees’ organizational commitment as well as the influence of job satisfaction on organizational citizenship behavior differ between diverse cultures