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Daily deal sites have become the latest Internet sensation, providing discounted offers to customers for restaurants, ticketed events, services, and other items. We begin by undertaking a study of the economics of daily deals on the web,…
Groupon has become the latest Internet sensation, providing daily deals to customers in the form of discount offers for restaurants, ticketed events, appliances, services, and other items. We undertake a study of the economics of daily…
Yelp ratings are often viewed as a reputation metric for local businesses. In this paper we study how Yelp ratings evolve over time. Our main finding is that on average the first ratings that businesses receive overestimate their eventual…
In the era of Big Data and Social Computing, the role of customer reviews and ratings can be instrumental in predicting the success and sustainability of businesses. In this paper, we show that, despite the apparent subjectivity of user…
Social Networking accounts for a significant chunk of interest among various online activities~\cite{smith2009social}. The proclivity of being social, online, has been ingrained in us so much that we are actively producing content for the…
The impact of ratings on a restaurant plays a major role in attracting future customers to that restaurant. The word of mouth has been systematically replaced with the online reviews. It gives a sense of satisfaction for people to know…
In the last four years, daily deals have emerged from nowhere to become a multi-billion dollar industry world-wide. Daily deal sites such as Groupon and Livingsocial offer products and services at deep discounts to consumers via email and…
Online reviews are typically written by volunteers and, as a consequence, information about seller quality may be under-provided in digital marketplaces. We study the extent of this under-provision in a large-scale randomized experiment…
The United Nations Consumer Protection Guidelines lists "access ... to adequate information ... to make informed choices" as a core consumer protection right. However, problematic online reviews and imperfections in algorithms that detect…
Consumers' purchase decisions are increasingly influenced by user-generated online reviews. Accordingly, there has been growing concern about the potential for posting "deceptive opinion spam" -- fictitious reviews that have been…
Social media has changed the landscape of marketing and consumer research as the adoption and promotion of businesses is becoming more and more dependent on how the customers are interacting and feeling about the business on platforms like…
User-generated reviews of products are vital assets of online commerce, such as Amazon and Yelp, while fake reviews are prevalent to mislead customers. GNN is the state-of-the-art method that detects suspicious reviewers by exploiting the…
Auditing is critical to ensuring the fairness and reliability of decision-making systems. However, auditing a black-box system for bias can be challenging due to the lack of transparency in the model's internal workings. In many web…
Yelp has served and will continue to serve as a data-driven application. Yelp has published a dataset containing business information, reviews, user information, and check-in information. This paper will examine this dataset to provide…
As online reviews increasingly drive consumer decisions, the impact of review interface design on rating authenticity remains under-explored. This research investigates how evaluation sequence ("Rating-First" vs. "Review-First") influences…
How to tell if a review is real or fake? What does the underworld of fraudulent reviewing look like? Detecting suspicious reviews has become a major issue for many online services. We propose the use of a clique-finding approach to discover…
Online review systems are important components in influencing customers' purchase decisions. To manipulate a product's reputation, many stores hire large numbers of people to produce fake reviews to mislead customers. Previous methods…
We have conducted three empirical studies of the effects of friend recommendations and general ratings on how online users make choices. These two components of social influence were investigated through user studies on Mechanical Turk. We…
In online review sites, the analysis of user feedback for assessing its helpfulness for decision-making is usually carried out by locally studying the properties of individual reviews. However, global properties should be considered as well…
Review websites, such as TripAdvisor and Yelp, allow users to post online reviews for various businesses, products and services, and have been recently shown to have a significant influence on consumer shopping behaviour. An online review…