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

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

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