Social Media Effectiveness

Over the last decade, the advent of social media such as online product reviews (e.g., Amazon.com),blogs and other social networking sites (e.g., Facebook.com) has dramatically changed the way consumers obtain and exchange information about products. This dissertation investigates the impact of various types of social media on product performance and compares the effectiveness of social and traditional media under various conditions. Specifically, the first chapter performs a meta-analysis of consumer-generated WOM elasticity in social media to identify the factors that influence the impact of WOM on product sales and to assess the generalizability of the relationship. The second chapter examines how social media may influence product performance in different product contexts as compared with traditional media, which assists managers in making better media decisions. Taken together, this dissertation evaluates the progress in this field, and then takes a step further by applying past findings to understand how social media may perform at various stages in the product lifecycle

Trauma, Love, and Identity Development in Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Persons in the stage of adolescence are eager to know who they are. They are curious about their unique characteristics and identities and how they can start to bring about the self-realization that provides a gateway to adulthood by exploring those characteristics and identities. In this process of self-exploration, adolescents who receive encouragement as they search for an authentic identity, though they sometimes have conflicts with parents and others, are likely to develop a secure ego-identity and a strong sense of independence and self-control. By contrast, adolescents who fail to receive encouragement during the process of identity exploration, for whatever reason, may remain unsure about who they are, and hence feel insecure and confused about themselves as well as their future.  The present study uses the fictional character Harry Potter to explore these issues in greater depth, mainly focusing on his early adolescent years—that is, when he is 11-13 years old. The study demonstrates that Harry Potter can manage to resolve conflicting ideas and thereby lay the foundations for a healthy ego-identity despite difficult circumstances. The study uses Erikson’s and other psychologists’ understanding of the importance of self-exploration in adolescence as an interpretive lens to examine the dynamics of trauma, love, and self-realization in Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. More specifically, it considers how family love (or the lack thereof), mentorship, and friendship in adolescence impact Harry’s mental and physical behaviors and influence the development of his identity.

A Meta-Analysis of Electronic Word-of-Mouth Elasticity

The authors conduct a meta-analysis on the effect of electronic word of mouth on sales by examining 51 studies (involving 339 volume and 271 valence elasticities) and primary data collected on product characteristics (durability, trialability, and usage condition), industry characteristics (industry growth and competition), and platform characteristics (expertise and trustworthiness). Their analysis reveals that electronic word-of-mouth volume (valence) elasticity is .236 (.417). More importantly, the findings show that volume and valence elasticities are higher for privately consumed, low-trialability products that operate in less competitive industries and whose reviews are carried on independent review sites. Furthermore, volume elasticities are higher for durable goods and for reviews on specialized review sites, whereas valence elasticities are greater for community-based sites. Drawing on the results, they discuss several implications for managers and researchers and explain why valence elasticities are often found to be insignificant. Finally, they propose numerous directions for future research in the area on the basis of their findings

Quantum criticality in interacting bosonic Kitaev-Hubbard models

Motivated by recent work on the non-Hermitian skin effect in the bosonic Kitaev-Majorana model, we study the quantum criticality of interacting bosonic Kitaev-Hubbard models on a chain and a two-leg ladder. In the hard-core limit, we show exactly that the non-Hermitian skin effect disappears via a transformation from hard-core bosonic models to spin-1/2 models. We also show that hard-core bosons can engineer the Kitaev interaction, the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and the compass interaction in the presence of the complex hopping and pairing terms. Importantly, quantum criticalities of the chain with a three-body constraint and unconstrained soft-core bosons are investigated by the density matrix renormalization group method. This work reveals the effect of many-body interactions on the non-Hermitian skin effect and highlights the power of bosons with pairing terms as a probe for the engineering of interesting models and quantum phase transitions.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure