Tag Archives: doc2vec method

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.comWorking 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. The literature has examined the direct and indirect effects of incentivized reviews on subsequent organic reviews within consumers who received incentives. However, since incentivized reviews and reviewers are often only a small proportion of a review platform (only 1.2% in our sample), it is important to understand whether their presence and absence on the platform affect the organic reviews from other reviewers who have not received incentives, which are often in the majority. We theorize two underlying effects that incentivized reviews can generate on other organic reviews: the herding effect from imitating incentivized reviews and the disclosure effect from the increased trust or skepticism by explicit incentive disclosure statements. Those two effects make organic reviews either follow or deviate from incentivized reviews. Using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to identify incentivized reviews and a natural experiment caused by a policy change on Amazon.com in October 2016, we conduct difference-in-differences with propensity score matching analyses to identify the effects of banning incentivized reviews on organic reviews. Our results suggest the disclosure effects are salient: banning incentivized reviews has positive effects on organic reviews in terms of frequency, sentiment, length, image, and helpfulness. Moreover, we find that the presence of incentivized reviews has poisoned the well for organic reviews regardless of the incentivized review ratio and that the effect is heterogeneous to product quality uncertainty. Our findings contribute to the literature on online review and platform design and provide insights to platform managers.

Strategic Competitive Positioning: A Structural Hole-based Firm-level Opportunity Construct for Information Systems Research

Lee, Myunghwan, Gene Moo Lee, Hasan Cavusoglu, Marc-David L. Seidel. “Strategic Competitive Positioning: A Structural Hole-based Firm-level Opportunity Construct for Information Systems Research”, [Latest version: Nov 27, 2024]

  • Previous title: Strategic Competitive Positioning: Unsupervised Operationalization of a Structural Hole-based Firm-specific Construct
  • doc2vec model of 10-K reports: Link
  • Presented at UBC MIS Seminar 2018, CIST 2019 (Seattle, WA), KrAIS 2019 (Munich, Germany), DS 2021 (online), KrAIS 2021 (Austin, TX), UT Dallas 2022, KAIST 2022, Korea Univ 2022, INFORMS 2022 (Indianapolis, IN)
  • Funded by Sauder Exploratory Grant 2019
  • Research assistants: Raymond Situ, Sahil Jain

We build on Burt’s structural hole concept to theorize a firm-specific strategic competitive positioning (SCP) construct for information systems (IS) research. Using unsupervised document embeddings, we operationalize the SCP construct to capture a firm’s relative competitive and strategic positioning in a similarity matrix of U.S. public firms based on their annual reports. Our construct dynamically captures competitive positioning across firms and years, relying on neither artificially bounded industry classification systems nor significant expert intervention to construct the measure, ensuring a more efficient and adaptable approach. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this construct through a series of empirical analyses investigating the effects of SCP on firm value and survival. The results show that our measure outperforms existing measures in successfully predicting post-IPO performance. This paper makes significant contributions to the IS literature by proposing an organizational theory-based unsupervised approach to dynamically conceptualize and measure firm-level strategic competitive positioning from unstructured corporate disclosure documents.