This article uses actual word-of-mouth (WOM) information to examine the dynamic patterns of WOM and how it helps explain box office revenue. The WOM data were collected from the Yahoo Movies Web site. The results show that WOM activities are the most active during a movie's prerelease and opening week and that movie audiences tend to hold relatively high expectations before release but become more critical in the opening week. More important, WOM information offers significant explanatory power for both aggregate and weekly box office revenue, especially in the early weeks after a movie opens. However, most of this explanatory power comes from the volume of WOM and not from its valence, as measured by the percentages of positive and negative messages.

Product-harm crises often result in product recalls, which can have a significant impact on a firm's reputation, sales, and financial value. In managing the recall process, some firms adopt a proactive strategy in responding to consumer complaints, while others are more passive. In this study, the authors examine the impact of these strategic alternatives on firm value using Consumer Product Safety Commission recalls during a 12-year period from 1996 to 2007. Using the event study method, the authors show that regardless of firm and product characteristics, proactive strategies have a more negative effect on firm value than more passive strategies. An explanation for this surprising result is that the stock market interprets proactive strategies as a signal of substantial financial losses to the firm. When a firm proactively manages a product recall, the stock market infers that the consequence of the product-harm crisis is sufficiently severe that the firm had no choice but to act swiftly to reduce potential financial losses. Therefore, firms dealing with product recalls must be sensitive to how investors might interpret a proactive strategy and be aware of its potential drawbacks.

In this paper, we examine the persuasive influences of online user comments (or word-of-mouth) and of the reviews by movie critics on moviegoers’ evaluation of to-be-released movies. Two distinctive features of this study are: (1) moviegoers are considered to be heterogeneous in their movie going frequency and (2) word-of-mouth and critical reviews are concurrently available, and the views expressed in the two messages are in conflict. Using three experiments with natural stimuli, we find that the persuasive effect of online word-of-mouth is stronger on infrequent than on frequent moviegoers, especially when it is negative (Study 1). The effect of negative word-of-mouth on infrequent moviegoers is enduring even in the presence of positive reviews by movie critics (Study 2). The relative influence of word-of-mouth and critical reviews are asymmetric with infrequent moviegoers more influenced by word-of-mouth, while frequent moviegoers more influenced by the reviews (Study 3). We validate this source–segment alignment through secondary data analysis.

Gambogic acid, usually isolated as an inseparable stereomeric mixture of C-2 epimers, was newly separated into two epimers (1 and 2) from the gamboges of Garcinia hanburyi. The stereochemistry at C-2 was clearly defined by extensive spectroscopic analysis and direct comparison of NMR and HPLC data with those of the known R-epimer. Both epimers were examined for their cytotoxicities against human leukemia K562 (K562/S) and doxorubicin-resistant K562 (K562/R) cell lines. Different from doxorubicin (IC (50) = 10.78 microM for K562/R and 0.66 microM for K562/S), epimers 1 and 2 exhibited similar activities against both cell lines (IC(50) = 1.32 and 0.89 microM for 1, IC(50) = 1.11 and 0.86 microM for 2). These results suggested that both epimers were not multidrug resistance (MDR) substrates. Furthermore, epimers 1 and 2 were tested for their inhibitory effects against six human cytochrome P-450 enzymes. Epimers 1 and 2 showed little inhibitory effects toward five of the enzymes except CYP2C9. Interestingly, when tested against CYP2C9, S-epimer 2 had an inhibitory effect 20-fold stronger than that of R-epimer 1.