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,...

Online communities exist in many forms and sizes. Yet, there is limited insight into why some online communities are sustainable, while others disappear. We find that in order to maintain sustainability, online communities exhibit a typical hierarchical social circle structure that balances...

Online freelance marketplaces are websites that match buyers of electronically deliverable services with freelancers. While freelancing has grown in recent years, it faces the classic ‘information asymmetry’ problem – buyers face uncertainty over seller quality. Typically, these markets...

The study analyzed the various dimensions of customers’ opinions about social media advertisement on buying behaviour. The total number of questionnaires distributed in the self-administered survey was 750 sets. A purposive sampling method is applied in this research for selecting the sample....

Online social communities have become an important communication channel for people to share and discover information. Pieces of information spread within the community via the underlying social network, from one individual to another. However, with the unprecedented ease and low cost of...

Background: E-commerce websites have been established expressly as useful online communication platforms, which is rather significant. Through them, users can easily perform online transactions such as shopping or ordering food and sharing their experiences or feedback. Objectives: Customers'...

The Web is the largest human information construct in history transforming our society. How can we understand, measure and model the Web evolution in order to design effective policies and optimize its social benefit? Early measurements of the Internet traffic and the Web graph indicated the...

We examine how word-of-mouth learning may lead to uniform and possibly inefficient actions in finite time among a network of agents. In our model, agents are identically informed a priori and observe network neighbors’ actions as well as the payoffs of some or all of those actions (a...