Tag Archives: machine learning

IS / Marketing Papers on Multimodal Data Analytics (Image, Video, Audio)

Last update: Sep 7, 2023

With the advent of social media and mobile platforms, visual and multimodal data are becoming the first citizen in big data analytics research. Compared to textual data that require significant cognitive efforts to comprehend, visual data (such as images and videos) can easily convey the message from the content creator to the general audience. To conduct large-scale studies on such data types, researchers need to use machine learning and computer vision approaches. In this post, I am trying to organize studies in Information Systems, Marketing, and other management disciplines that leverage large-scale analysis of image and video datasets. The papers are ordered randomly:

  1. Yang, Yi, Yu Qin, Yangyang Fan, Zhongju Zhang (2023). Unlocking the Power of Voice for Financial Risk Prediction: A Theory-Driven Deep Learning Design Approach. MIS Quarterly 47(1): 63-96.
  2. Ceylan, G., Diehl, K., & Proserpio, D. (2023). EXPRESS: Words Meet Photos: When and Why Visual Content Increases Review Helpfulness. Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming.
  3. Alex Burnap, John R. Hauser, Artem Timoshenko (2023) Product Aesthetic Design: A Machine Learning Augmentation. Marketing Science, forthcoming.
  4. Gao, Jia, Ying Rong, Xin Tian, Yuliang Yao (2023) Improving Convenience or Saving Face? An Empirical Analysis of the Use of Facial Recognition Payment Technology in Retail. Information Systems Research, forthcoming.
  5. Guan, Yue, Yong Tan, Qiang Wei, Guoqing Chen (2023) When Images Backfire: The Effect of Customer-Generated Images on Product Rating Dynamics. Information Systems Research, Forthcoming.
  6. Son, Y., Oh, W., Im, I. (2022) The Voice of Commerce: How Smart Speakers Reshape Digital Content Consumption and Preference. MIS Quarterly, forthcoming.
  7. Hou, J., Zhang, J., & Zhang, K. (2022). Pictures that are Worth a Thousand Donations: How Emotions in Project Images Drive the Success of Crowdfunding Campaigns? An Image Design Perspective. MIS Quarterly, Forthcoming.
  8. Lysyakov, Mikhail, Siva Viswanathan (2022) Threatened by AI: Analyzing Users’ Responses to the Introduction of AI in a Crowd-Sourcing Platform. Information Systems Research, Forthcoming.
  9. Hanwei Li, David Simchi-Levi, Michelle Xiao Wu, Weiming Zhu (2022) Estimating and Exploiting the Impact of Photo Layout: A Structural Approach. Management Science, Forthcoming.
  10. Bharadwaj, N., Ballings, M., Naik, P. A., Moore, M, Arat, M. M. (2022) “A New Livestream Retail Analytics Framework to Assess the Sales Impact of Emotional Displays,” Journal of Marketing, 86(1): 24-47.
  11. Chen, Z., Liu, Y.-J., Meng, J., Wang, Z. (2022) “What’s in a Face? An Experiment on Facial Information and Loan-Approval Decision“, Management Science, forthcoming.
  12. Lu, T., Wang, A., Yuan, X., Zhang, X. (2020) “Visual Distortion Bias in Consumer Choices,” Management Science, forthcoming.
  13. Zhou, M., Chen, G. H., Ferreira, P., Smith, M. D. (2021) “Consumer Behavior in the Online Classroom: Using Video Analytics and Machine Learning to Understand the Consumption of Video Courseware,” Journal of Marketing Research 58(6): 1079-1100.
  14. Zhang, Shunyuan, Dokyun Lee, Param Vir Singh, Kannan Srinivasan (2021) What Makes a Good Image? Airbnb Demand Analytics Leveraging Interpretable Image Features. Management Science 68(8):5644-5666.
  15. Gunarathne, P., Rui, H., Seidmann, A. (2021) “Racial Bias in Customer Service: Evidence from Twitter,” Information Systems Research 33(1): 43-54.
  16. Shin, D., He, S., Lee, G. M., Whinston, A. B., Cetintas, S., Lee, K.-C. (2020) “Enhancing Social Media Analysis with Visual Data Analytics: A Deep Learning Approach,” MIS Quarterly 44(4): 1459-1492. [Details]
  17. Li, Y., Xie, Y. (2020) “Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? An Empirical Study of Image Content and Social Media Engagement,” Journal of Marketing Research 57(2): 1-19.
  18. Zhang, Q., Wang, W., Chen, Y. (2020) “Frontiers: In-Consumption Social Listening with Moment-to-Moment Unstructured Data: The Case of Movie Appreciation and Live comments,” Marketing Science 39(2).
  19. Liu, L., Dzyabura, D., Mizik, N. (2020) “Visual Listening In: Extracting Brand Image Portrayed on Social Media,” Marketing Science 39(4): 669-686.
  20. Peng, L., Cui, G., Chung, Y., Zheng, W. (2020) “The Faces of Success: Beauty and Ugliness Premiums in E-Commerce Platforms,” Journal of Marketing 84(4): 67-85.
  21. Liu, X., Zhang, B., Susarla, A., Padman, R. (2020) “Go to YouTube and Call Me in the Morning: Use of Social Media for Chronic Conditions,” MIS Quarterly 44(1b): 257-283.
  22. Zhao, K., Hu, Y., Hong, Y., Westland, J. C. (2020) “Understanding Characteristics of Popular Streamers in Live Streaming Platforms: Evidence from Twitch.tv,” Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Forthcoming.
  23. Ordenes, F. V., Zhang, S. (2019) “From words to pixels: Text and image mining methods for service research,” Journal of Service Management 30(5): 593-620.
  24. Wang, Q., Li, B., Singh, P. V. (2018) “Copycats vs. Original Mobile Apps: A Machine Learning Copycat-Detection Method and Empirical Analysis,” Information Systems Research 29(2): 273-291.
  25. Lu, S., Xiao, L., Ding, M. (2016) “A Video-Based Automated Recommender (VAR) System for Garments,” Marketing Science 35(3): 484-510.
  26. Xiao, L., Ding, M. (2014) “Just the Faces: Exploring the Effects of Facial Features in Print Advertising,” Marketing Science 33(3), 315-461.
  27. Suh, K.-S., Kim, H., Suh, E. K. (2011) “What If Your Avatar Looks Like You? Dual-Congruity Perspectives for Avatar Use,” MIS Quarterly 35(3), 711-729.
  28. Todorov, A., Porter, J. M. (2014) “Misleading First Impressions: Different for Different Facial Images of the Same Person“, Psychological Science 25(7): 1404-1417.
  29. Todorov, A., Madnisodza, A. N., Goren, A., Hall, C. C. (2005) “Inferences of Competence from Faces Predict Election Outcomes“, Science 308(5728): 1623-1626.
  30. Mueller. U., Mazur, A. (1996) “Facial Dominance of West Point Cadets as a Predictor of Later Military Rank“, Social Forces 74(3): 823-850.
  31. Lee, H, Nam, K. “When Machine Vision Meets Human Fashion: Effects of Human Intervention on the Efficiency of CNN-Driven Recommender Systems in Online Fashion Retail”, Working Paper.
  32. Lysyhakov M, Viswanathan S (2021) “Threatened by AI: Analyzing users’ responses to the introduction of AI in a crowd-sourcing,” Working Paper.
  33. Park, S., Lee, G. M., Shin, D., Han, S.-P. (2020) “Targeting Pre-Roll Ads using Video Analytics,” Working Paper.
  34. Choi, A., Ramaprasad, J., So, H. (2021) Does Authenticity of Influencers Matter? Examining the Impact on Purchase Decisions, Working Paper.
  35. Park, J., Kim, J., Cho, D., Lee, B. Pitching in Character: The Role of Video Pitch’s Personality Style in Online Crowdsourcing, Working Paper.
  36. Yang, J., Zhang, J., Zhang Y. (2021) First Law of Motion: Influencer Video Advertising on TikTok, Working Paper.
  37. Davila, A., Guasch (2021) Manager’s Body Expansiveness, Investor Perceptions, and Firm Forecast Errors and Valuation, Working Paper.
  38. Peng, L., Teoh, S. H., Wang, U., Yan, J. (2021) Face Value: Trait Inference, Performance Characteristics, and Market Outcomes for Financial Analysts, Working Paper.
  39. Zhang, S., Friedman, E., Zhang, X., Srinivasan, K., Dhar, R. (2020) Serving with a Smile on Airbnb: Analyzing the Economic Returns and Behavioral Underpinnings of the Host’s Smile,” Working Paper.
  40. Park, K., Lee, S., Tan, Y. (2020) “What Makes Online Review Videos Helpful? Evidence from Product Review Videos on YouTube,” UW Working Paper.
  41. Doosti, S., Lee, S., Tan, Y. (2020) “Social Media Sponsorship: Metrics for Finding the Right Content Creator-Sponsor Matches,” UW Working Paper.
  42. Koh, B., Cui, F. (2020) “Give a Gist: The Impact of Thumbnails on the View-Through of Videos,” KU Working Paper.
  43. Hou J.R., Zhang J., Zhang K. (2018) Can title images predict the emotions and the performance of crowdfunding projects? Workshop on e-Business.

Trustworthy Face? The Effect and Drivers of Comprehensive Trust in Online Job Market Platform

Kwon, Jun Bum, Donghyuk Shin, Gene Moo Lee, Jake An, Sam Hwang (2020) “Trustworthy Face? The Effect and Drivers of Comprehensive Trust in Online Job Market Platform”. Work-in-progress.

The abstract will appear here.

Robots Serve Humans: Does AI Robot Adoption Enhance Operational Efficiency and Customer Experience?

Lee, Myunghwan, Gene Moo Lee, Donghyuk Shin, Sang-Pil Han (2022) “Robots Serve Humans? Understanding the Economic and Societal Impacts of AI Robots in the Service Industry”, Working Paper.

  • Presented at WITS (2020), KrAIS (2020), UBC (2021), DS (2022)
  • Research assistants: Raymond Situ, Gallant Tang

Service providers, such as restaurants, have been adopting various robotics technologies to improve operational efficiency and increase customer satisfaction. AI Robotics technologies bring new restaurant experiences to customers by taking orders, cooking, and serving. While the impact of industrial robots has been well documented in the literature, little is known about the impact of customer-facing service robot adoption. To fill this gap, this work-in-progress study aims to analyze the impact of service robot adoption on restaurant service quality using 4,610 restaurants and their online customer reviews. We analyzed the treated effect of robot adoption using a difference-in-differences approach with propensity score and exact matching. Estimation results show that restaurant robot adoption has a positive impact on customer satisfaction, specifically on perceived service quality. This study provides both academic and practical implications on emerging AI robotics techniques.

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.

When Does Congruence Matter for Pre-roll Video Ads? The Effect of Multimodal, Ad-Content Congruence on the Ad Completion

Park, Sungho, Gene Moo Lee, Donghyuk Shin, Sang-Pil Han. “When Does Congruence Matter for Pre-roll Video Ads? The Effect of Multimodal, Ad-Content Congruence on the Ad Completion“, Working Paper [Last update: Jan 29, 2023]

  • Previous title: Targeting Pre-Roll Ads using Video Analytics
  • Funded by Sauder Exploratory Research Grant 2020
  • Presented at Southern Methodist University (2020), University of Washington (2020), INFORMS (2020), AIMLBA (2020), WITS (2020), HKUST (2021), Maryland (2021), American University (2021), National University of Singapore (2021), Arizona (2022), George Mason (2022), KAIST (2022), Hanyang (2022), Kyung Hee (2022), McGill (2022)
  • Research assistants: Raymond Situ, Miguel Valarao

Pre-roll video ads are gaining industry traction because the audience may be willing to watch an ad for a few seconds, if not the entire ad, before the desired content video is shown. Conversely, a popular skippable type of pre-roll video ads, which enables viewers to skip an ad in a few seconds, creates opportunity costs for advertisers and online video platforms when the ad is skipped. Against this backdrop, we employ a video analytics framework to extract multimodal features from ad and content videos, including auditory signals and thematic visual information, and probe into the effect of ad-content congruence at each modality using a random matching experiment conducted by a major video advertising platform. The present study challenges the widely held view that ads that match content are more likely to be viewed than those that do not, and investigates the conditions under which congruence may or may not work. Our results indicate that non-thematic auditory signal congruence between the ad and content is essential in explaining viewers’ ad completion, while thematic visual congruence is only effective if the viewer has sufficient attentional and cognitive capacity to recognize such congruence. The findings suggest that thematic videos demand more cognitive processing power than auditory signals for viewers to perceive ad-content congruence, leading to decreased ad viewing. Overall, these findings have significant theoretical and practical implications for understanding whether and when viewers construct congruence in the context of pre-roll video ads and how advertisers might target their pre-roll video ads successfully.

Strategic Competitive Positioning: An Unsupervised Structural Hole-based Firm-specific Measure

Lee, Myunghwan, Gene Moo Lee, Hasan Cavusoglu, Marc-David L. Seidel. “Strategic Competitive Positioning: Unsupervised Operationalization of a Structural Hole-based Firm-specific Construct”, [Latest version: Aug 15, 2023]

  • 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

In this paper, we build on the network structural hole concept of organizational theory to theorize an individual firm-specific strategic competitive positioning (SCP) construct. We use unsupervised document embedding approaches to operationalize the SCP construct by capturing each firm’s relative competitive and strategic positioning in a strategic similarity matrix of all existing U.S. publicly traded firms’ annual corporate filings. This approach enables us to construct a theoretically driven firm-level SCP measure with minimal human expert intervention. Our construct dynamically captures competitive positioning across different firms and years without using artificially bounded and often outdated industry classification systems. We illustrate how the dynamic measure captures industry-level and cross-industry strategic changes. Then, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our construct with an empirical analysis showing the imprinting and dynamic effects of SCP on firm performance. The results show that our dynamic SCP measure outperforms existing competition measures and successfully predicts post-IPO performance. This paper makes significant contributions to the information systems and organizations literatures by proposing an organizational theory-based unsupervised approach to dynamically conceptualize and measure firm-level strategic competitive positioning. The construct can be easily applied to firm-specific, industry-level, and cross-industry research questions in many contexts across many disciplines.

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.

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.

Developing Cyber Risk Assessment Framework for Cyber Insurance: A Big Data Approach (KIRI Research Report 2018)

Lee, G. M. (2018). Developing Cyber Risk Assessment Framework for Cyber Insurance: A Big Data Approach (in Korean). KIRI Research Report 2018-15.

As our society is heavily dependent on information and communication technology, the associated risk has also significantly increased. Cyber insurance has been emerged as a possible means to better manage such cyber risk. However, the cyber insurance market is still in a premature stage due to the lack of data sharing and standards on cyber risk and cyber insurance. To address this issue, this research proposes a data-driven framework to assess cyber risk using externally observable cyber attack data sources such as outbound spam and phishing websites. We show that the feasibility of such an approach by building cyber risk assessment reports for Korean organizations. Then, by conducting a large-scale randomized field experiment, we measure the causal effect of cyber risk disclosure on organizational security levels. Finally, we develop machine-learning models to predict data breach incidents, as a case of cyber incidents, using the developed cyber risk assessment data. We believe that the proposed data-driven methods can be a stepping-stone to enable information transparency in the cyber insurance market.

Predicting Litigation Risk via Machine Learning

Lee, Gene Moo*, James Naughton*, Xin Zheng*, Dexin Zhou* (2020) “Predicting Litigation Risk via Machine Learning,” Working Paper. [SSRN] (* equal contribution)

This study examines whether and how machine learning techniques can improve the prediction of litigation risk relative to the traditional logistic regression model. Existing litigation literature has no consensus on a predictive model. Additionally, the evaluation of litigation model performance is ad hoc. We use five popular machine learning techniques to predict litigation risk and benchmark their performance against the logistic regression model in Kim and Skinner (2012). Our results show that machine learning techniques can significantly improve the predictability of litigation risk. We identify two best-performing methods (random forest and convolutional neural networks) and rank the importance of predictors. Additionally, we show that models using economically-motivated ratio variables perform better than models using raw variables. Overall, our results suggest that the joint consideration of economically-meaningful predictors and machine learning techniques maximize the improvement of predictive litigation models.