W e study the drivers of the emergence of opinion leaders in a networked community where users establish links to others, indicating their "trust" for the link receiver's opinion. This leads to the formation of a network, with high in-degree individuals being the opinion leaders. We use a dyad-level proportional hazard model with time-varying covariates to model the growth of this network. To estimate our model, we use Weighted Exogenous Sampling with Bayesian Inference, a methodology that we develop for fast estimation of dyadic models on large network data sets. We find that, in the Epinions network, both the widely studied "preferential attachment" effect based on the existing number of inlinks (i.e., a network-based property of a node) and the number and quality of reviews written (i.e., an intrinsic property of a node) are significant drivers of new incoming trust links to a reviewer (i.e., inlinks to a node). Interestingly, we find that time is an important moderator of these effects-intrinsic node characteristics are a stronger short-term driver of additional inlinks, whereas the preferential attachment effect has a smaller impact but it persists for a longer time. Our novel insights have important managerial implications for the design of online review communities.

Live streaming is becoming prevalent and its rapid rise also makes it an attractive scientific research subject. Despite recent research focuses on understanding the motivations and behavior of people engaging live streaming, we know little about how the adoption of live streaming strategy for e-commerce on product sales. In this paper, we establish a causal relationship between adopting live streaming strategy for e-commerce and online product sales. Our results indicate that there is a 21.8% increase in online sales volume after adopting live streaming strategy. Furthermore, we find live streaming strategy is more efficient for the sellers who mainly sell experience goods-they have 27.9% more than those whose products are mainly search goods. This work is the first quantitative study, to our knowledge, on how the adoption of live streaming strategy on online product sales.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract