The advent of social media and peer-to-peer technologies offers the possibility of driving the full democratization of news and information, undercutting the agenda-setting of large media outlets and their relative control of news and information flows. We are now about a decade into the era of...

China is the most important foreign market for Hollywood blockbusters because of its large number of moviegoers. Exploring blockbusters in China and marketing strategies is essential for Hollywood studios. We analyzed data on 959 movies and users of Douban and Maoyan to determine the effects of...

We quantify the effects of others' adoptions and word-of-mouth (volume and valence) on consumers' product adoption decisions. We differentiate between the effects of word-of-mouth and observed adoptions from friends ("personal network") and the effects of word-of-mouth and observed adoptions...

This research provides an empirical test of the “Twitter effect,” which postulates that microblogging word of mouth (MWOM) shared through Twitter and similar services affects early product adoption behaviors by immediately disseminating consumers’ post-purchase quality evaluations. This is...

The use of testimonials from existing customers has always been an important technique in traditional marketing communications. However, it is not clear whether attempts by firms to promote customer testimonials in social media will be equally effective. First, often the reach of a firm on...

Online consumer product review is an emerging market phenomenon that is playing an increasingly important role in consumers' purchase decisions. This paper examines a fundamental issue concerning online consumer review, i.e., the functions such reviews have for an online marketer. We argue that...

The aim of this paper is to study the empirical phenomenon of rating bubbles, i.e. clustering on extremely positive values in e-commerce platforms and rating web sites. By means of a field experiment that exogenously manipulates prior ratings for a hotel in an important Italian tourism...

This Chapter discusses the emergence of online word of mouth, the process by which consumers disseminate their views about marketplace goods and services. Due to online word of mouth, consumers have an unprecedented ability to influence the brand perceptions of other consumers. Unfortunately,...

This paper reviews existing studies investigating online communication on products and services, also known as, electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). The first half of the paper summaries what is known about eWOM in the literature. Existing studies largely relate to the marketing field and are...