Tag Archives: ft50

Computational Framework for Measuring Strategic Opportunities Based on Structural Hole Theory (JMIS 2026)

Lee, Myunghwan, Gene Moo Lee, Hasan Cavusoglu, Marc-David L. Seidel (2026) “Computational Framework for Measuring Strategic Opportunities Based on Structural Hole Theory“, Journal of Management Information Systems, Forthcoming.

  • Myunghwan Lee‘s Dissertation Chapter
  • 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 2018, CIST 2019, KrAIS 2019, DS 2021, KrAIS 2021, UT Dallas 2022, KAIST 2022, Korea Univ 2022, INFORMS 2022
  • Funded by Sauder Exploratory Grant 2019
  • Research assistants: Raymond Situ, Sahil Jain

Although opportunities play a central role in firm innovation and performance, prior research lacks a scalable, theory-grounded approach to measuring them. Existing measures are either context-specific or detached from explicit relational mechanisms, limiting their generalizability and interpretability. To address this gap, we propose a structural hole theory-guided computational design framework that enables fine-grained strategic opportunity measures: hole-opening, hole-entering, and non-hole positions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework through a systematic analysis of IPO outcomes using panel data on U.S. public firms. We find that hole-opening positions are associated with higher post-IPO valuations, but a lower likelihood of M&A exits, whereas hole-entering and non-hole positions are linked to lower IPO valuations but higher probabilities of M&A outcomes. These patterns highlight distinct opportunity roles embedded in firms’ structural positions. We conclude the paper by discussing the broad applicability of the theory-guided computational framework for opportunity measurement in various IS research contexts.

Enhancing Social Media Analysis with Visual Data Analytics: A Deep Learning Approach (MISQ 2020)

Shin, Donghyuk, Shu He, Gene Moo Lee, Andrew B. Whinston, Suleyman Cetintas, Kuang-Chih Lee (2020) Enhancing Social Media Analysis with Visual Data Analytics: A Deep Learning Approach, MIS Quarterly, 44(4), pp. 1459-1492. [SSRN]

  • Based on an industry collaboration with Yahoo! Research
  • The first MISQ methods article based on machine learning
  • Presented in WeB (Fort Worth, TX 2015), WITS (Dallas, TX 2015), UT Arlington (2016), Texas FreshAIR (San Antonio, TX 2016), SKKU (2016), Korea Univ. (2016), Hanyang (2016), Kyung Hee (2016), Chung-Ang (2016), Yonsei (2016), Seoul National Univ. (2016), Kyungpook National Univ. (2016), UKC (Dallas, TX 2016), UBC (2016), INFORMS CIST (Nashville, TN 2016), DSI (Austin, TX 2016), Univ. of North Texas (2017), Arizona State (2018), Simon Fraser (2019), Saarland (2021), Kyung Hee (2021), Tennessee Chattanooga (2021), Rochester (2021), KAIST (2021), Yonsei (2021), UBC (2022), Temple (2023)

This research methods article proposes a visual data analytics framework to enhance social media research using deep learning models. Drawing on the literature of information systems and marketing, complemented with data-driven methods, we propose a number of visual and textual content features including complexity, similarity, and consistency measures that can play important roles in the persuasiveness of social media content. We then employ state-of-the-art machine learning approaches such as deep learning and text mining to operationalize these new content features in a scalable and systematic manner. For the newly developed features, we validate them against human coders on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Furthermore, we conduct two case studies with a large social media dataset from Tumblr to show the effectiveness of the proposed content features. The first case study demonstrates that both theoretically motivated and data-driven features significantly improve the model’s power to predict the popularity of a post, and the second one highlights the relationships between content features and consumer evaluations of the corresponding posts. The proposed research framework illustrates how deep learning methods can enhance the analysis of unstructured visual and textual data for social media research.

Understanding Security Vulnerability Awareness, Firm Incentives, and ICT Development in Pan-Asia (JMIS 2020)

Zhuang, Yunhui, Yunsik Choi, Shu He, Alvin Chung Man Leung, Gene Moo Lee, Andrew B. Whinston (2020) Understanding Security Vulnerability Awareness, Firm Incentives, and ICT Development in Pan-Asia. Journal of Management Information Systems, 37(3): 668-693.

This paper investigates how the awareness of a security vulnerability index affects firms’ security protection strategy and how the information awareness effect interacts with firm incentives and country-wide IT development level. The security index is constructed based on outgoing spams and phishing website hosting, which may serve as an indicator of a firm’s security controls. To study whether security vulnerability awareness causes firms to improve their security, we conducted a randomized field experiment on 1,262 firms in six Pan-Asian countries and regions. Among 631 randomly selected treated firms, we alerted them of their security vulnerability index and their relative rankings compared to their peers via advisory emails and websites. Difference-in-differences analyses show that compared with the controls, the treated firms improve their security over time, with a statistically significant reduction of outgoing spam volume according to one of the data sources but not phishing website hosting. However, a statistically significant reduction in phishing website hosting was observed among non-web hosting firms, suggesting that firms’ underlying incentives play an important role in the treatment effect. Lastly, exploiting the multi-country nature of the data, we found that firms in countries with high information and communications technology (ICT) development are more responsive to our intervention because they have higher IT capabilities and more resources to resolve security issues. Our study provides cybersecurity policymakers with useful insights on how firm incentives and ICT environments play roles in firms’ security measure adoption.

Matching Mobile Applications for Cross Promotion (ISR 2020)

Lee, Gene Moo, Shu He, Joowon Lee, Andrew B. Whinston (2020) Matching Mobile Applications for Cross-Promotion. Information Systems Research 31(3), pp. 865-891.

  • Based on an industry collaboration with IGAWorks
  • Presented in Chicago Marketing Analytics (Chicago, IL 2013), WeB (Auckland, New Zealand 2014), Notre Dame (2015), Temple (2015), UC Irvine (2015), Indiana (2015), UT Dallas (2015), Minnesota (2015), UT Arlington (2015), Michigan State (2016), Korea Univ (2021)
  • Dissertation Paper #3
  • Research assistant: Raymond Situ

The mobile applications (apps) market is one of the most successful software markets. As the platform grows rapidly, with millions of apps and billions of users, search costs are increasing tremendously. The challenge is how app developers can target the right users with their apps and how consumers can find the apps that fit their needs. Cross-promotion, advertising a mobile app (target app) in another app (source app), is introduced as a new app-promotion framework to alleviate the issue of search costs. In this paper, we model source app user behaviors (downloads and postdownload usages) with respect to different target apps in cross-promotion campaigns. We construct a novel app similarity measure using latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling on apps’ production descriptions and then analyze how the similarity between the source and target apps influences users’ app download and usage decisions. To estimate the model, we use a unique data set from a large-scale random matching experiment conducted by a major mobile advertising company in Korea. The empirical results show that consumers prefer more diversified apps when they are making download decisions compared with their usage decisions, which is supported by the psychology literature on people’s variety-seeking behavior. Lastly, we propose an app-matching system based on machine-learning models (on app download and usage prediction) and generalized deferred acceptance algorithms. The simulation results show that app analytics capability is essential in building accurate prediction models and in increasing ad effectiveness of cross-promotion campaigns and that, at the expense of privacy, individual user data can further improve the matching performance. This paper has implications on the trade-off between utility and privacy in the growing mobile economy.

On the Spillover Effects of Online Product Reviews on Purchases: Evidence from Clickstream Data (ISR 2021)

Kwark, Young*, Gene Moo Lee*, Paul A. Pavlou*, Liangfei Qiu* (2021) On the Spillover Effects of Online Product Reviews on Purchases: Evidence from Clickstream Data. Information Systems Research 32(3): 895-913. (* equal contribution)

  • Data awarded by Wharton Consumer Analytics Initiative
  • Presented in WCBI (Snowbird, UT 2015), KMIS (Busan, Korea 2016), Minnesota (2016), ICIS (Dublin, Ireland 2016), Boston Univ. (2017), HEC Paris (2017), and Korea Univ. (2018)
  • An earlier version was published in ICIS 2016
  • Research assistants: Bolat Khojayev, Raymond Situ

We study the spillover effects of the online reviews of other covisited products on the purchases of a focal product using clickstream data from a large retailer. The proposed spillover effects are moderated by (a) whether the related (covisited) products are complementary or substitutive, (b) the choice of media channel (mobile or personal computer (PC)) used, (c) whether the related products are from the same or a different brand, (d) consumer experience, and (e) the variance of the review ratings. To identify complementary and substitutive products, we develop supervised machine-learning models based on product characteristics, such as product category and brand, and novel text-based similarity measures. We train and validate the machine-learning models using product pair labels from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our results show that the mean rating of substitutive (complementary) products has a negative (positive) effect on purchasing of the focal product. Interestingly, the magnitude of the spillover effects of the mean ratings of covisited (substitutive and complementary) products is significantly larger than the effects on the focal product, especially for complementary products. The spillover effect of ratings is stronger for consumers who use mobile devices versus PCs. We find the negative effect of the mean ratings of substitutive products across different brands on purchasing of a focal product to be significantly higher than within the same brand. Lastly, the effect of the mean ratings is stronger for less experienced consumers and for ratings with lower variance. We discuss implications on leveraging the spillover effect of the online product reviews of related products to encourage online purchases.

Does Deceptive Marketing Pay? The Evolution of Consumer Sentiment Surrounding a Pseudo-Product-Harm Crisis (J. Business Ethics 2019)

Song, Reo, Ho Kim, Gene Moo Lee, and Sungha Jang (2019) Does Deceptive Marketing Pay? The Evolution of Consumer Sentiment Surrounding a Pseudo-Product-Harm Crisis. Journal of Business Ethics, 158(3), pp. 743-761.

The slandering of a firm’s products by competing firms poses significant threats to the victim firm, with the resulting damage often being as harmful as that from product-harm crises. In contrast to a true product-harm crisis, however, this disparagement is based on a false claim or fake news; thus, we call it a pseudo-product-harm crisis. Using a pseudo-product-harm crisis event that involved two competing firms, this research examines how consumer sentiments about the two firms evolved in response to the crisis. Our analyses show that while both firms suffered, the damage to the offending firm (which spread fake news to cause the crisis) was more detrimental, in terms of advertising effectiveness and negative news publicity, than that to the victim firm (which suffered from the false claim). Our study indicates that, even apart from ethical concerns, the false claim about the victim firm was not an effective business strategy to increase the offending firm’s performance.

A Friend Like Me: Modeling Network Formation in a Location-Based Social Network (JMIS 2016)

Lee, Gene Moo*, Liangfei Qiu*, Andrew B. Whinston* (2016) A Friend Like Me: Modeling Network Formation in a Location-Based Social Network, Journal of Management Information Systems 33(4), pp. 1008-1033. (* equal contribution)

  • Best Paper Nomination at HICSS 2016
  • Presented in WITS (Auckland, New Zealand 2014), and WISE (Auckland, New Zeland 2014), HICSS (Kauai, HI 2016)
  • Dissertation Paper #2

This article studies the strategic network formation in a location-based social network. We build an empirical model of social link creation that incorporates individual characteristics and pairwise user similarities. Specifically, we define four user proximity measures from biography, geography, mobility, and short messages. To construct proximity from unstructured text information, we build topic models using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Using Gowalla data with 385,306 users, 3 million locations, and 35 million check-in records, we empirically estimate the model to find evidence on the homophily effect on network formation. To cope with possible endogeneity issues, we use exogenous weather shocks as our instrumental variables and find the empirical results are robust: network formation decisions are significantly affected by our proximity measures.

Toward a Better Measure of Business Proximity: Topic Modeling for Industry Intelligence (MISQ 2016)

Shi, Zhan, Gene Moo Lee, Andrew B. Whinston (2016) Toward a Better Measure of Business Proximity: Topic Modeling for Industry Intelligence. MIS Quarterly 40(4), pp. 1035-1056.

In this article, we propose a new data-analytic approach to measure firms’ dyadic business proximity. Specifically, our method analyzes the unstructured texts that describe firms’ businesses using the statistical learning technique of topic modeling, and constructs a novel business proximity measure based on the output. When compared with existent methods, our approach is scalable for large datasets and provides finer granularity on quantifying firms’ positions in the spaces of product, market, and technology. We then validate our business proximity measure in the context of industry intelligence and show the measure’s effectiveness in an empirical application of analyzing mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. high technology industry. Based on the research, we also build a cloud-based information system to facilitate competitive intelligence on the high technology industry.