Universities nowadays face an increasing competition for high-potential students. As students rely on opinions of their peers when deciding for a study program, universities benefit from positive word-of-mouth (WoM). A good way to increase positive WoM is to establish a favorable reputation among their current students. Therefore, this study investigates reputational drivers with a focus on the...

Research has widely demonstrated that personal sources of information are more influential than firmgenerated sources. The potential impact of others’ opinions has dramatically increased with the development of the Internet. However, very little is known about what makes certain opinions more influential than others. The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of electronic word of...

The emergence of online communities has enabled firms to monitor consumer-generated online word-of-mouth (WOM) in realtime 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 introduc...

Free sampling in digital format has become a common business practice in the online market offering consumers first-hand experience with products, due to its low marginal cost and extensive online distribution. At the same time, online word of mouth (WOM) has also been a prevalent strategy on the Internet for increasing product visibility and providing trustworthy product information. Those two...

The main goal of this study is to investigate the factors influencing customer decision support satisfaction with the e-commerce site, including e-WOM (electronic word of mouth) system interactivity and EQ (eQuality). We also identify the antecedents to e-WOM system interactivity and EQ, as well as the outcome of decision support satisfaction. Most leading e-commerce companies have developed th...

Word-Of-Mouth (WOM) is the opinion of consumers about a product. There is currently a clear trend in the use of WOM to diffuse information about a new product, known as WOM marketing campaigns. Marketing researchers are studying the impact of the different types of these campaigns has. The difficulty in getting data and isolating the effect that is analyzed limits the research of marketers in t...

As compared to the traditional advertising, the word-of-mouth (WOM) communications have striking advantages such as significantly lower cost and rapid delivery; this is especially the case with the popularity of online social networks. This paper addresses the issue of maximizing the overall profit of a WOM marketing campaign. A marketing process with both positive and negative WOM is modeled a...

With the broad reach of the Internet, online users frequently resort to various word-of-mouth (WOM) sources, such as online user reviews and professional reviews, during online decision making. Although prior studies generally agree on the importance of online WOM, we have little knowledge of the interplay between online user reviews and professional reviews. This paper empirically investigates...

This study aims to explore the causal relationship between e-word-of-mouth (e-WOM) and its influence on purchase decisions through structural equation modeling (SEM). Five constructs were formulated through literature review: expertise, search extent, own experience, trustworthiness, and e-WOM effect. Results of this study show that four constructs all have positive influence on e-WOM effect, a...

Word-of-mouth (WOM) has been recognized as one of the most influential resources of information transmission. However, conventional WOM communication is only effective within limited social contact boundaries. The advances of information technology and the emergence of online social network sites have changed the way information is transmitted and have transcended the traditional limitations of...