Tag Archives: BERT

Do Incentivized Reviews Poison the Well? Evidence from a Natural Experiment at Amazon.com

Park, Jaecheol, Arslan Aziz, Gene Moo Lee. “Do Incentivized Reviews Poison the Well? Evidence from a Natural Experiment at Amazon.com”, Working Paper.

  • Presentations: UBC (2021), KrAIS (2021), WISE (2021), PACIS (2022), SCECR (2022), BU Platform (2022), CIST (2022), BIGS (2022)
  • Preliminary version in PACIS 2022 Proceedings

The rapid growth in e-commerce has led to a concomitant increase in consumers’ reliance on digital word-of-mouth to inform their choices. As such, there is an increasing incentive for sellers to solicit reviews for their products. Recent studies have examined the direct effect of receiving incentives or introducing incentive policy on review writing behavior. However, since incentivized reviews are often only a small proportion of the overall reviews on a platform, it is important to understand whether their presence on the platform has spillover effects on the unincentivized reviews which are often in the majority. Using the state-of-the-art language model, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to identify incentivized reviews, a document embedding method, Doc2Vec to create matched pairs of Amazon and non-Amazon branded products, and a natural experiment caused by a policy change on Amazon.com in October 2016, we conduct a difference-in-differences analysis to identify the spillover effects of banning incentivized reviews on unincentivized reviews. Our results suggest that there are positive spillover effects of the ban on the review sentiment, length, helpfulness, and frequency, suggesting that the policy stimulates more reviews in the short-run and more positive, lengthy, and helpful reviews in the long run. Thus, we find that the presence of incentivized reviews on the platform poisons the well of reviews for unincentivized reviews.

Corporate Social Network Analysis: A Deep Learning Approach

Cao, Rui, Gene Moo Lee, Hasan Cavusoglu. “Corporate Social Network Analysis: A Deep Learning Approach,” Working Paper.

Identifying inter-firm relationships is critical in understanding the industry landscape. However, due to the dynamic nature of such relationships, it is challenging to capture corporate social networks in a scalable and timely manner. To address this issue, this research develops a framework to build corporate social network representations by applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques on a corpus of 10-K filings, describing the reporting firms’ perceived relationships with other firms. Our framework uses named-entity recognition (NER) to locate the corporate names in the text, topic modeling to identify types of relationships included, and BERT to predict the type of relationship described in each sentence. To show the value of the network measures created by the proposed framework, we conduct two empirical analyses to see their impacts on firm performance. The first study shows that competition relationship and in-degree measurements on all relationship types have prediction power in estimating future earnings. The second study focuses on the difference between individual perspectives in an inter-firm social network. Such a difference is measured by the direction of mentions and is an indicator of a firm’s success in network governance. Receiving more mentions from other firms is a positive signal to network governance and it shows a significant positive correlation with firm performance next year.