Statistical Science

A Statistical Measure of a Population’s Propensity to Engage in Post-Purchase Online Word-of-Mouth

Chrysanthos Dellarocas and Ritu Narayan

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Abstract

The emergence of online communities has enabled firms to monitor consumer-generated online word-of-mouth (WOM) in real-time by mining publicly available information from the Internet. A prerequisite for harnessing this new ability is the development of appropriate WOM metrics and the identification of relationships between such metrics and consumer behavior. Along these lines this paper introduces a metric of a purchasing population’s propensity to rate a product online. Using data from a popular movie website we find that our metric exhibits several relationships that have been previously found to exist between aspects of a product and consumers’ propensity to engage in offline WOM about it. Our study, thus, provides positive evidence for the validity of our metric as a proxy of a population’s propensity to engage in post-purchase online WOM. Our results also suggest that the antecedents of offline and online WOM exhibit important similarities.

Article information

Source
Statist. Sci. Volume 21, Number 2 (2006), 277-285.

Dates
First available in Project Euclid: 7 August 2006

Permanent link to this document
https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1154979827

Digital Object Identifier
doi:10.1214/088342306000000169

Mathematical Reviews number (MathSciNet)
MR2324086

Zentralblatt MATH identifier
05191866

Keywords
Word-of-mouth metrics online communities viral marketing motion picture reviews

Citation

Dellarocas, Chrysanthos; Narayan, Ritu. A Statistical Measure of a Population’s Propensity to Engage in Post-Purchase Online Word-of-Mouth. Statist. Sci. 21 (2006), no. 2, 277--285. doi:10.1214/088342306000000169. https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1154979827.


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