The advent of Internet has generated an on-line world, where some online activity can potentially be complete substitutes for off-line socio-economic activity (e.g., on-line shopping, on-line game, and on-line theater). Individual consumers now have more options for conducting their social and economic activities, and if cognitive and other costs related to a broader choice are not huge, consumers can potentially get a bigger surplus from these kinds of online economic activity. However, the new internet-induced socio-economic structure is rapidly evolving and there are significant challenges for researchers coming to grips with its complex dynamics. Our group is engaged in a diverse set of research initiatives that investigate the different intermingled elements of the internet-induced socio-economic world: the challenges posed to privacy and intellectual property rights, consumer purchasing in electronic commerce, online word-of-mouth phenomena, etc.
Internet is becoming a dominant technology platform for the conduct of business. The advantage of business-to-consumer (B2C) commerce based on IT, has resulted in the establishment of many online vendors . T here is increasing interest in understanding the consumer purchase behaviour in online markets. Given this trend, a fundamental question to be answered is: how does online-shopping substitute for off-line shopping activity and what can managers do about it? Our research aims to answer this fundamental question by investigating a large scale, real world data set of online and offline transactions from a large retail mall in Korea. By combining text mining and econometric research methods, we are modeling the linkages between online and offline consumer activities.
As one of the most exciting trends in computing today, consumer generated social media (CGM) holds the potential to fundamentally change the ways in which information is accessed and presented, knowledge is processed and extracted, and how business is conducted. CGM can affect user adoption of new products and services, sellers' pricing policies, vendors' product design, search engine advertising, and eventually the nature of competition in markets. Organisations have adopted blogs to enable the two-way communication between the firms and the consumers to unleash value inside the consumer opinions. With the pervasiveness and rapid growth of mobile and wireless devices, the access availability of consumer generated media continues to accelerate in amount, variety, and scale. We are investigating how CGM propagates in online social networks, and how CGM is consumed by the participants in the social networks. By formally modeling the characteristics of CGM and the online world-of-mouth phenomena, we draw implications for both marketing managers as well as for designers involved in online content presentation.
Social network aggregation represents the process of collecting content from multiple social network services. The task is often performed by a social network aggregator such as Facebook and MySpace, which pulls together information into a single location, or helps a user consolidate multiple social networking profiles into one profile. As a result, users can (1) add friends, (2) send messages, (3) provide commentary or news on a particular subject (blog) to notify friends about themselves, and further (4) enjoy various virtual activities such as community activity in a social network aggregator. We are exploring the role of social aggregators in connecting different social networks, and the implications for different types of participants in the individual networks.
Selected Publications
[1] Nan HU, Hasan CAVUSOGLU, Yingjiu LI, and Dan MA. Information Technology Diffusion with Influentials, Imitators, and Opponents: Model and Preliminary Evidence. Journal of Management Information Systems, 2010.
[2] Youngsoo KIM and Ee-Peng LIM. Social Network Aggregation: How Are Social Networks Connected? Working Paper, 2010.
[3] Youngsoo KIM, Ramayya KRISHNAN, and William B. VOGT. On Product-level Uncertainty and Online Purchase Behavior: An Empirical Analysis. Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE), Monteal, Canada, December 2007.
[4] Youngsoo KIM, and Ramayya KRISHNAN. Trajectory-based Consumer Segmentation and Product Positioning in Online Markets. Working paper, 2010.
