Tag Archives: collaboration

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.

AppPrint: Automatic Fingerprinting of Mobile Applications in Network Traffic (PAM 2015)

Miskovic, S., Lee, G. M., Liao, Y., and Baldi, M. (2015). AppPrint: Automatic Fingerprinting of Mobile Applications in Network Traffic, In Proceedings of Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM 2015), New York, New York.

  • Based on an industry collaboration with Narus (then Boeing subsidiary, now acquired by Symantec)
  • PAM is a premier conference in the network measurement area (h5-index: 24).

Increased adoption of mobile devices introduces a new spin to the Internet: mobile apps are becoming a key source of user traffic. Surprisingly, service providers and enterprises are largely unprepared for this change as they increasingly lose understanding of their traffic and fail to persistently identify individual apps. App traffic simply appears no different than any other HTTP data exchange. This raises a number of concerns for security and network management. In this paper, we propose AppPrint, a system that learns fingerprints of mobile apps via comprehensive traffic observations. We show that these fingerprints identify apps even in small traffic samples where app identity cannot be explicitly revealed in any individual traffic flows. This unique AppPrint feature is crucial because explicit app identifiers are extremely scarce, leading to a very limited characterization coverage of the existing approaches. In fact, our experiments on a nation-wide dataset from a major cellular provider show that AppPrint significantly outperforms any existing app identification. Moreover, the proposed system is robust to the lack of key app-identification sources, i.e., the traffic related to ads and analytic services commonly leveraged by the state-of-the-art identification methods.

Event Detection using Customer Care Calls (INFOCOM 2013)

Chen, Y., Lee, G. M., Duffield, N., Qiu, L., and Wang, J. (2013). Event Detection using Customer Care Calls. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2013), Turin, Italy.

  • Based on an industry collaboration with AT&T Labs – Research.
  • INFOCOM is a top-tier conference in the networking area (h5-index: 72)

Customer care calls serve as a direct channel for a service provider to learn feedbacks from their customers. They reveal details about the nature and impact of major events and problems observed by customers. By analyzing customer care calls, a service provider can detect important events to speed up problem resolution. However, automating event detection based on customer care calls poses several significant challenges. First, the relationship between customers’ calls and network events is blurred because customers respond to an event in different ways. Second, customer care calls can be labeled inconsistently across agents and across call centers, and a given event naturally gives rise to calls spanning a number of categories. Third, many important events cannot be detected by looking at calls in one category. How to aggregate calls from different categories for event detection is important but challenging. Lastly, customer care call records have high dimensions (e.g., thousands of categories in our dataset). In this paper, we propose a systematic method for detecting events in a major cellular network using customer care call data. It consists of three main components: (i) using a regression approach that exploits temporal stability and low-rank properties to automatically learn the relationship between customer calls and major events, (ii) reducing the number of unknowns by clustering call categories and using L 1 norm minimization to identify important categories, and (iii) employing multiple classifiers to enhance the robustness against noise and different response time. For the detected events, we leverage Twitter social media to summarize them and to locate the impacted regions. We show the effectiveness of our approach using data from a large cellular service provider in the US.