Diffusion of real versus misinformation during a crisis event: A big data-driven approach

2023 | International Journal of Information Management | Citations: 0

Authors: King, Kelvin K.; Wang, Bin

Abstract: Misinformation has captured the interest of academia in recent years with severa ... Expand

Abstract: Misinformation has captured the interest of academia in recent years with several studies looking at the topic broadly with inconsistent results. In this research, we attempt to bridge the gap in the literature by examining the impacts of user-, time-, and content-based characteristics that affect the virality of real versus misinformation during a crisis event. Using a big data-driven approach, we collected over 42 million tweets during Hurricane Harvey and obtained 3589 original verified real or false tweets by cross-checking with fact-checking websites and a relevant federal agency. Our results show that virality is higher for misinformation, novel tweets, and tweets with negative sentiment or lower lexical density. In addition, we reveal the opposite impacts of sentiment on the virality of real news versus misinformation. We also find that tweets on the environment are less likely to go viral than the baseline religious news, while real social news tweets are more likely to go viral than misin­ formation on social news. Collapse

Topics: Twitter misinformation social media hurricane big data

Methods: machine learning computational algorithm natural language processing decision tree classification gradient boosting

Profit vs. Equality? The Case of Financial Risk Assessment and A New Perspective on Alternative Data

2023 | Management Information Systems Quarterly | Citations: 0

Authors: Lu, Tian; Zhang, Yingjie; Li, Beibei

Abstract: The importance of pursuing financial inclusion to accelerate economic growth an ... Expand

Abstract: The importance of pursuing financial inclusion to accelerate economic growth and enhance financial sustainability has been well noted. However, studies have provided few actionable insights into how financial institutions can balance the potential socioeconomic trade-off between profitability and equality. One major challenge arises from a lack of understanding of the impacts of various types of market information available on financial equality beyond economic profitability. Another challenge lies in how the socioeconomic trade-off under a large set of counterfactual policies in a real-world setting can be evaluated. Our motivation for the present study was the emerging sources of digitized user-behavior data (i.e., "alternative data") stemming from the high penetration of mobile devices and internet access. Accordingly, we investigated how alternative data from smartphones and social media can help mitigate potential financial inequality while preserving business profitability in the context of financial credit risk assessment. We partnered with a leading microloan website to design a novel "meta" experiment that allowed us to simulate various real-world field experiments under an exhaustive set of counterfactual policies. Interestingly, we found that profiling user financial risk using smartphone activities is 1.3 times more effective in improving financial inclusion than using online social media information (23.05% better vs. 18.11%), and nearly 1.3 times more effective in improving business profitability (42% better vs. 33%). Surprisingly, we found that using consumers' online shopping activities for credit risk profiling can hurt financial inclusion. Furthermore, we investigated potential explanations for financial inclusion improvements. Our findings suggest that alternative data, especially users' smartphone activities, not only demonstrate higher ubiquity but also appear to be more orthogonal to conventional sensitive demographic attributes. This, in turn, can help mitigate statistical bias driven by the unobserved factors or underrepresentative training samples in machine-based risk assessment processes. Collapse

Topics: website social media smartphone microblog electronic commerce

Methods: experiment XGBoost machine learning experimental design k-nearest neighbor

Responding to Online Reviews in Competitive Markets: A Controlled Diffusion Approach

2023 | Management Information Systems Quarterly | Citations: 0

Authors: Yang, Mingwen; Zheng, Zhiqiang (Eric); Mookerjee, Vijay; Chen, Hongyu

Abstract: We study how firms respond to online customer reviews in a competitive market w ... Expand

Abstract: We study how firms respond to online customer reviews in a competitive market where they jostle with one another for sales based on online ratings. The focus of this paper is on how firms can optimally manage their ratings through management response and how review ratings affect the sales and profits of competing firms. We develop a controlled diffusion process to model the coevolution of sales and ratings as a function of the response strategy chosen to maximize profit over time. Our model considers a variety of factors, such as profit margin and customer rating sensitivity, that influence a firm's effort to manage ratings and subsequently its sales and profits. More response effort needs to be exerted to manage ratings when either the profit margin of a tour is very high or customers are very sensitive to ratings. We estimate our model using data on Ctrip's tours that include each tour's sales, reviews, prices, and tour features. We find that consumers anchor their beliefs in the mean market rating and that their purchase decisions depend on the tour's rating relative to this anchor. Thus, relative, rather than absolute, ratings matter. Our study informs firms on how competition and other primitives impact their efforts to manage ratings and hence profit. Our methodology allowed us to conduct "what-if" analyses, for example, to study what would happen to the review ratings, sales, and profits of a tour if a firm adopted a different response strategy. We were also able to provide turnaround strategies for struggling tours, i.e., factors that a loss-making tour should change if it wishes to make a positive profit. Ultimately, we conducted a competitive analysis that allowed us to modify certain parameters that affect the intensity of competition and hence the sales and the profits of competing tours. Finally, we demonstrate the flexibility of the model by extending it to incorporate multiple state variables that might affect the response strategy. Collapse

Topics: application programming interface online learning system Twitter innovation management service quality

Methods: longitudinal research time series analysis generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model natural language processing autoregressive moving average model

Theories: co-evolution theory

Heterogeneous Demand Effects of Recommendation Strategies in a Mobile Application: Evidence from Econometric Models and Machine-Learning Instruments

2022 | Management Information Systems Quarterly | Citations: 0

Authors: Adamopoulos, Panagiotis; Ghose, Anindya; Tuzhilin, Alexander

Abstract: In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of various recommendation strategies ... Expand

Abstract: In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of various recommendation strategies in the mobile channel and their impact on consumers’ utility and demand levels for individual products. We find significant differences in effectiveness among various recommendation strategies. Interestingly, recommendation strategies that directly embed social proofs for the recommended alternatives outperform other recommendations. In addition, recommendation strategies combining social proofs with higher levels of induced awareness due to the prescribed temporal diversity have an even stronger effect on the mobile channel. We also examine the heterogeneity of the demand effect across items, users, and contextual settings, further verifying empirically the aforementioned information and persuasion mechanisms and generating rich insights. We also facilitate the estimation of causal effects in the presence of endogeneity using machine-learning methods. Specifically, we develop novel econometric instruments that capture product differentiation (isolation) based on deeplearning models of user-generated reviews. Our empirical findings extend the current knowledge regarding the heterogeneous impact of recommender systems, reconcile contradictory prior results in the related literature, and have significant business implications. Collapse

Topics: mobile system broadband cellular network mobile channel online review mobile application

Methods: econometric modeling instrumental variables estimation machine learning robustness check computational algorithm

Theories: symbolic interaction theory social network theory cognitive theory consumer search theory trust theory

Know Thy Context: Parsing Contextual Information from User Reviews for Recommendation Purposes

2022 | Information Systems Research | Citations: 1

Authors: Bauman, Konstantin; Tuzhilin, Alexander

Abstract: In this paper, we study an important problem of parsing contextual information f ... Expand

Abstract: In this paper, we study an important problem of parsing contextual information from user reviews for recommendation purposes. First, we study the ways contextual information is expressed in user reviews and obtain novel insights about it. Among other things, we demonstrate that such type of information tends to appear at the beginning of the review, in longer sentences, in the sentences written in the past tense or using gerund form, and in the sentences referring to some points in time. Second, we propose a novel context parsing method for systematically extracting contextual information from user-generated reviews that relies on the insights obtained in our study. We apply the proposed method to three different Yelp applications (restaurants, hotels, and beauty & spas) and demonstrate that it works well and leads to better recommendation performance than the baseline approaches. Our method systematically extracts more comprehensive sets of relevant contextual variables and corresponding phrases than the baselines. Our analysis also shows the importance of the newly discovered contextual information for recommendation purposes. The obtained results and the proposed method can help to get more comprehensive knowledge about contextual variables in a given application that leads to better recommendations. Collapse

Topics: online review recommender system logistics management user experience user-generated content

Methods: word2vec hierarchical clustering machine learning product review experiment

Microblogging Replies and Opinion Polarization: A Natural Experiment

2022 | Management Information Systems Quarterly | Citations: 0

Authors: Lu, Yingda; Wu, Junjie; Tan, Yong; Chen, Jian

Abstract: In recent years, there has been a heated discussion on opinion polarization on s ... Expand

Abstract: In recent years, there has been a heated discussion on opinion polarization on social media platforms. Extant research attributes the emergence of echo chambers to higher exposure to information from users’ existing social networks, which consists of like-minded others and argues that the provision of information from outside users’ networks could alleviate opinion polarization. In this paper, we formulate a hierarchical Bayesian learning model to investigate the impact of replies, one of the main channels for information outside of users’ networks, on opinion polarization. We leverage a unique natural experiment contained in the data from a leading microblogging website in China in which the reply function was shut down for three days. This setting allows us to identify the impact of replies from that of peer microblogs. We found that shutting down reply function reduced sentiment polarization on the microblogging site. In addition, this effect was more significant for individuals with higher social media participation. The results of this study shed light on marketing campaign strategies as well as the ways in which platform design can reduce polarization. Collapse

Topics: microblog social media Twitter website marketing management

Methods: robustness check natural experiment experimental group descriptive statistic machine learning

Consumer preference analysis based on text comments and ratings: A multi-attribute decision-making perspective

2022 | Information & Management | Citations: 0

Authors: Zhu, Bin; Guo, Dingfei; Ren, Long

Abstract: With the popularity of social media, extracting consumer preferences from online ... Expand

Abstract: With the popularity of social media, extracting consumer preferences from online consumer-generated content is of vital importance for product/service providers to develop tailored marketing strategies. However, existing approaches face difficulties analyzing consumer preferences over different attributes of alternatives (restaurants, hotels, etc.), which hinders product/service providers from comprehensively understanding consumer choice decisions. To address this issue, we solve for the consumer preferences over the attributes represented by attribute weights based on consumers’ historical data, including text comments and overall ratings. Specifically, for each comment and a corresponding rating, we first employ sentiment analysis to calculate values of the attributes, and then develop a quadratic programming model to solve for the weights. Based on a stream of a consumer’s text comments and overall ratings, we can correspondingly obtain a stream of weights indexed by the comment time. We then model this stream of weights as hesitant judgments and employ a hesitant multiplicative programming method to solve for the final weights that fit the consumer’s preferences over attributes at the highest satisficing level. In the application of recommendation, our approach not only provides insights into the consumer’s preferences but also has higher prediction power compared with some state-of-the-art methods. Collapse

Topics: recommender system artificial intelligence

Methods: sentiment analysis optimization model word embedding non linear optimization historical review

Theories: theory of bounded rationality

Box office sales and social media: A cross-platform comparison of predictive ability and mechanisms

2021 | Decision Support Systems | Citations: 0

Authors: Bogaert, Matthias; Ballings, Michel; Van den Poel, Dirk; Oztekin, Asil

Abstract: This paper aims to determine the power of social media data (Facebook and Twitte ... Expand

Abstract: This paper aims to determine the power of social media data (Facebook and Twitter) in predicting box office sales, which platforms, data types and variables are the most important and why. To do so, we compare several models based on movie data, Facebook data, and Twitter data. We benchmark these model comparisons using various prediction algorithms. Next, we apply information-fusion sensitivity analysis to evaluate which variables are driving the predictive performance. Our analysis shows that social media data significantly increases the predictive power of traditional box office prediction models. Facebook data clearly outperform Twitter data and including user-generated content next to marketer-generated always improves predictive power. Our sensitivity analysis reveals that volume and valence based combination variables pertaining to Facebook comments are the most important variables. Furthermore, we provide an in-depth analysis of the potential mechanisms driving differential predictive ability of Facebook and Twitter. Our findings suggest that Twitter has less of an impact on box office sales than Facebook because Twitter users have less source credibility than Facebook users. Our results are important for practitioners, marketers and academics who want to employ social media data for box office sales predictions. Collapse

Topics: Twitter Facebook social media application programming interface user-generated content

Methods: computational algorithm sensitivity analysis decision tree classification sentiment analysis random forest classification

Theories: signaling theory

News-Induced Dynamic Networks for Market Signaling: Understanding the Impact of News on Firm Equity Value

2021 | Information Systems Research | Citations: 0

Authors: Chen, Kun; Li, Xin; Luo, Peng; Zhao, J. Leon

Abstract: Firm relations, which inform the competitive environments of firms, are critical ... Expand

Abstract: Firm relations, which inform the competitive environments of firms, are critical to firm operations and are often factored into investor decisions. Previous studies and practices have considered relatively stable and long-term business relations as an indicator of firm market value. Public news often reports on business relations, especially dynamic and short-term opportunities and challenges involving different partners. Learning about firm relations from news is commonly done by human investors but has not been studied systematically in previous research, leading to a research opportunity in market signaling via dynamic firm relations. In this study, we propose a new approach to market signaling by leveraging text-mining methods to extract cobenefit/counter-benefit networks based on firms’ mutual or conflicting interests in business events. We find that the resulting networks in the long term are partially aligned with firm cooperation and competition relationships, confirming their semantic implications for investor perception and attention. Our empirical study further shows that dynamic networks formed in a short time period (measured by firm centrality in networks) have significant impacts on firm equity value, after controlling for market activities and other information from news, such as volume, sentiment, and comentions. We show that dynamic networks can provide additional value in predicting firm equity value over stable networks. Moreover, the negative effects of counter-benefit networks emerge rapidly and persist longer than the positive effects of cobenefit networks. This study provides new insights into investor perception of news and suggests new research directions for financial text mining. Our research findings on market signaling via news-induced networks also have an impact on financial practices, such as market analysis and automatic trading. Collapse

Topics: network effect database system supply chain management blog accounting

Methods: computational algorithm machine learning experiment longitudinal research natural language processing

Theories: cognitive attention theory

What Types of Crowd Generate More Valuable Content? Evidence from Cross-Platform Posting

2021 | International Conference on Information Systems | Citations: 0

Authors: Zhang, Xiaohui; Du, Qianzhou; Zhang, Zhongju

Abstract: We examine the value of crowd-generated content on a financial social media pla ... Expand

Abstract: We examine the value of crowd-generated content on a financial social media platform. The value of such content is measured by the incremental accuracy of using the cues from those content to predict stock volatility. We argue that the characteristic features of a crowd, such as crowd size, crowd diversity, and crowd independence, have significant impacts on the predictive value of the subsequent content generated by the crowd. Leveraging a natural experiment setup where the financial platform no longer receives cross-postings from another major social media platform, we show empirical evidence that crowd size determines the predictive value of the corresponding crowd-generated content. Furthermore, the impact of the characteristic size on the value of generated content is likely heterogeneous, i.e., moderated by crowd diversity and independence. We provide discussions about the implications of this study to the value of crowd-generated data, crowd wisdom, and digital platform competition. Collapse

Topics: Twitter social media Wikipedia business model productivity

Methods: experimental group natural experiment computational algorithm sentiment analysis regression analysis method