Does Twitter chatter matter? Online reviews and box office revenues

ABSTRACT

With a rapid rise of text-based social media and online Word-of-Mouth (WOM) activity, millions of people express their thoughts and opinions on a variety of topics. Considering that nowadays WOM is a most influential source of information when guiding consumers’ choice and purchase decisions, in this paper we look at the relationship between Twitter messages (tweets) and cinema box office revenues. Using static and dynamic panel data regression approaches, we show that the frequency, sentiment and timing of tweets posted about a film are correlated to different extent with the movie’s box office revenues, with negative tweets being particularly damaging to the box office revenues. From a managerial perspective, this is important to know, such that film production companies and distributors can adjust their strategy accordingly.     

From Returns to Tweets and Back: An Investigation of the Stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average

A sizeable percentage of investors are using social media to obtain information about companies (Cogent Research [2008]). As a consequence, social media content about firms may have an impact on stock prices (Hachman [2011]). Various studies utilize social media content to forecast stock market-related factors such as returns, volatility, or trading volume. The objective of this article is to investigate whether a bidirectional intraday relationship between stock returns and volatility and tweets exists. The study analyzed 150,180 minute-by-minute stock price and tweet data for the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average over a random 13-day interval from June 2 to June 18, 2014 using a BEKK-MVGARCH methodology. Findings indicate that 87% of stock returns are influenced by lagged innovations of the tweets data, but there is little evidence to support that the direction is reciprocal, with only 7% of tweets being influenced by lagged innovations of the stock returns. Results further show that the lagged innovations from 40 percent of stock returns affect the current conditional volatility of the tweets, while 73 percent of tweets affect the current conditional volatility of stock returns. Moreover, there is strong evidence to suggest that the volatility originating from the returns to the tweets persists for 33 percent of stocks; the volatility originating from the tweets to the returns persists for 73 percent of stocks. Last, 53 percent of stocks exhibit both immediate and persistent impacts from returns to tweets, while 90 percent of stocks exhibit both immediate and persistent impacts from tweets to returns. These results may help traders achieve superior returns by buying and selling individual stocks or options. Also, asset and mutual fund managers may benefit by developing a social media strategy.     

Does Social Media Get Your Attention?

The author investigates how social media affects stock prices and post–earnings announcement drift in response to companies’ quarterly earnings announcements. Using quarterly earnings data as well Twitter and StockTwits data, the author utilizes Twitter volume and a residual methodology to generate an attention proxy that is orthogonal to the growth of Twitter accounts. The author finds that the new attention brought by social media after the earnings announcements positively affects the cumulative abnormal returns. Further, even companies reporting bad news can still have positive immediate cumulative abnormal returns if they attract enough attention from investors after an earnings announcement. The new attention effects are different in both magnitudes and statistical significance between social media popular and unpopular industries.     

Welfare from a benefit viewpoint

Summary Individual welfare is most naturally measured in terms of individual utility but this has the well-known disadvantage that utility levels of different consumers cannot be meaningfully compared. This difficulty is traditionally avoided by using various willingness-to-pay measures, such as compensating and equivalent variation. These measures are based on price changes. This paper develops alternative welfare measures using willingness-to-trade concepts as originally proposed by Dupuit (1844). These measures are based directly on commodity bundle changes. These welfare measures can be represented as integrals under certain inverse demand functions.An important property of the proposed welfare measures studied here is that they can be meaningfully aggregated to form overall welfare measures. These measures in turn directly quantify a compensation criterion. It is shown that competitive prices provide a first-order approximation to the welfare measures. Furthermore a second-order approximation can be found by forming a suitable aggregation of the individual second-order effects.Finally, it is shown that the representations for consumer welfare as integrals under inverse demand curves can be extended to the aggregate measures as well. This then provides a complete complement to traditional measures based on price changes.This research was supported by Grant SES-9022881 from the National Science Foundation. The author wishes to thank Andrew Yates for valuable suggestions on this paper.     

Maximising Happiness?

The measurement of individual happiness challenges the notion that revealed preferences only reliably and empirically reflect individual utility. Reported subjective well-being is a broader concept than traditional decision utility; it also includes concepts like experience and procedural utility. Micro- and macroeconometric happiness functions offer new insights on determinants of life satisfaction. However, one should not leap to the conclusion that happiness should be maximized, as was suggested for social welfare function maximization. In contrast, happiness research strengthens the validity of an institutional approach, such as reflected in the theory of democratic economic policy.     

Risk Behavior Under Linear Utility Function

An uncertainly model based on money-market imperfections and on linear utility functions (of money) is reformulated so as to be directly with the traditional non-linear utility approach. We postulate that the utility is a linear functions of “augmented” income. But the augmented income is a non-linear function of the nominal income, due to differential interest rates. This new formulation is shown to generate all the essential implications of the traditional approach as in Friedman and Savage, Markowtiz, Arrow, and Pratt. [020]     

Measuring consumption efficiency with utility theory and stochastic frontier analysis

The concept of production efficiency has been studied since the 1960s, but consumption activity as well may be inefficient for various reasons, such as product complexity, lack of information, the bounded rationality of the consumer and imperfect markets, to name a few. This study proposes a conceptual framework for measuring the consumption efficiency of differentiated products, based on traditional utility theory. It employs stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) in an empirical analysis. It makes use of hedonic price theory to link traditional utility theory and the SFA framework. When the developed model is applied to the Korean personal computer market, empirical results indicate the levels and distribution of consumption efficiency in that market. The findings afford us a better understanding of the characteristics of the innovation process in that market.     

Implications of Regulation Policy Incentives for Strategic Control: An Integrative Model

Abstract ** : This paper proposes an internal management perspective of the company, as a complement to longstanding principal‐agency theory, for understanding the interchange between regulator and company. It draws from a longitudinal research project on understanding the implications of regulation policy incentives for strategic control in the management of UK monopoly network utilities and the management implications of regulatory policy making. This paper reports on how two utility companies have managed regulatory objectives alongside organizational ones in electricity distribution and gas transportation and suggests a new integrative model of strategic control for understanding utility management. It concludes if regulation policies are to be effective then regulators should understand the internal management of the companies if performance targets are to be attained .     

To what extent do network effects moderate the relationship between social media propagated news and investors’ perceptions?

As a prominent social media tool, Twitter enables prompt dissemination of financial news and information, which can have a substantial impact on investors’ perceptions and decision-making processes. The propagation of financial news and information through Twitter can either positively or negatively affect investors’ perceptions. As per network theory, the impact of information on one's perception and behavior is known as the network effect. Since Twitter is also a network, we tried to contribute more to this theory in this study by considering other factors that can have an impact on the perceptions of investors. We argue that the impact of financial information and news on investors’ perceptions is moderated by other factors such as connectivity, social ties, and network size of the network. To establish the links between them, we considered three key factors in investors’ networks: (1) network connectivity (network structure); (2) social ties circle (friends, family, colleagues); and (3) size of the network (number of contacts). The results of this study indicate that highly connected investors receive more information and hence, the impact of news is derived from the connectivity of investors within the network. The findings of the study also show that the social ties circle plays a crucial role in determining the impact of the news. The findings further indicate that the impact of news on investors’ perceptions also depends on the theme of the news.     

ENERGY UTILITIES, CONSERVATION, AND ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY

Academic and policy debate has centered around an apparent "underinvestment in conservation." This paper outlines traditional explanations for underinvestment and presents a prospect theory analysis of individual conservation behavior. On the basis of investment criteria, individuals seem to discriminate against conservation investments. While these decisions might appear rational as life style decisions, individual choice across different household appliances shows little consistency. For policymaking purposes, understanding and modeling actual behavior is crucial to maximizing social welfare. The insight of certain positive models of human behavior supports economic efficiency arguments for marketplace intervention. This paper argues that because individuals making conservation investment decisions apparently do not act according to the dictates of utilitarian economics, utility sponsored conservation programs are justified on economic efficiency grounds. Finally, in light of prospect theory considerations, the paper suggests marketing guidelines for conservation investments sponsored by electric utilities.     

A Study of Social Network Effects on the Stock Market

Consumer confidence is an economic indicator that measures the degree of optimism that consumers feel about the overall state of the economy as well as their personal financial situation. The authors measure consumer sentiment via analysis of social networks and show that such sentiment affects stock prices; specifically, the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Shiller, Fischer and Freidman [1984], Fisher and Statman [2003], and Bremmer [2008] also examine the influence of consumer sentiment, measured from Conference Board data, on the stock market. The authors add to this literature by creating a measure of consumer confidence by utilizing Twitter data and by examining the relationship between our measure of consumer sentiment and the S&P 500 and the Dow. They implemented lexicographic analysis of Twitter data over a three-month period and found that talk intensity of economic issues not only causes shifts in the daily stock market prices, but also has a significant negative effect.     

企业内部资本配置和金融体系二分法

从投融资实践看,企业内部存在一个活跃的资本市场;企业内部资本配置是区别于外部资本市场运作的资本配置机制。企业管理者运用内部资金实施投资项目的同时也就实施了一定的融资功能,因而企业组织本身就是金融体系的重要组成部分。传统的直接融资—间接融资或银行主导型—资本市场主导型二分法不足以刻画和概括金融体系的特征,新二分法"外部资本市场—企业内部资本市场"是对传统研究视角的有益补充。     

Short interest and the stock market relation with news sentiment from traditional and social media sources

We examine how the stock market relation to news sentiment—from traditional and social media (Twitter) sources—interacts with short selling of stocks. Our sample includes the S&P500 constituents for the period January 2016 to December 2020, providing 704,452 firm-day observations. We find evidence that both news sources are positively related to returns. The relationship is stronger for firms with a high short interest ratio, for small firms, and particularly for firms that are both small and highly shorted. This is consistent with short sellers targeting firms that are most responsive to (negative) news releases and so more likely to compensate for the additional costs encountered in shorting.     

Adoption and use of technology with low litigation risk – the case of financial reporting on Twitter by ASX companies

ABSTRACT

Corporate adoption of technology faces challenges such as resource constraints and litigation risk. To investigate if low litigation risk encourages technology adoption and its use, this paper investigates corporate financial reporting on Twitter, a voluntary corporate disclosure practice without obvious litigation risk in Australia. This study reviews 4,540 financial reporting related tweets from 222 ASX listed companies’ Twitter accounts. An examination of tweet sentiment reveals a positive reporting bias, as listed companies are more willing to disclose positive financial reporting information on Twitter. A comparison of corporate financial reporting tweets prior to and after 2013 reveals that use of Twitter for opportunistic voluntary disclosure is gaining popularity, a trend that warrants close attention by regulators in order to protect investors from selective disclosure with reporting bias.     

Utility Functions whose Parameters depend on Initial Wealth

Conventional one-period utility functions in Economics assume that initial wealth only enters preferences through the definition of final wealth. Consequently, those utility functions most utilized (i.e., exponential and quadratic) have implausible risk characteristics. The authors characterize a new class of utility function whose risk parameters depend upon initial wealth and obtain several desirable results. In particular, investors with quadratic and exponential utility functions can have decreasing risk aversion, and risky assets in a quadratic utility multi-asset environment do not have to be inferior as implied by the traditional framework.     

It's a Sin—Contraceptive Use,Religious Beliefs,and Long‐run Economic Development

This study presents a novel theory on the interaction of social norms, fertility, education, and their joint impact on long‐run economic development. The theory takes into account that sexual intercourse is utility enhancing and that the use of modern contraceptives potentially conflicts with prevailing social norms (religious beliefs). The theory motivates the existence of two steady states. At the traditional steady state, the economy stagnates, fertility is high, education is minimal, and the population sustains a norm according to which modern contraceptives are not used. At the modern steady state, the population has abandoned traditional beliefs, modern contraceptives are used, fertility is low and education and economic growth are high. Social dynamics explain why both equilibria are separated by a saddlepoint‐equilibrium (a separatrix), i.e. why it is so hard to transit from the traditional regime to the modern regime.     

Ecosystems,externalities, and economies

This paper incorporates an ecosystem model into a model of a simple economy. The decisionmaking agents in the ecosystem are individual organisms aggregated to the species level. A species may provide utility directly to humans, or it may provide utility indirectly because it is used either as a raw material in goods fabrication or as sustenance for other species. We describe a comparative static equilibrium of the ecosystem where species' demands for other species are equal to the supplies of those other species, and energy is conserved. The ecosystem is then embedded in the economy so that the effects of human intervention can be traced through both the ecosystem and the economy. Human intervention creates ecosystem externalities such that ecosystem equilibria are shifted and the new equilibria affect the utility or the production processes of other humans. This framework allows us to describe in principle which ecosystem services can be efficiently usurped by humans, which waste flows can be efficiently allowed into ecosystems, and which ecosystem organisms and physical attributes can be efficiently maintained.     

Information Acquisition in Financial Markets

Previous work on information and financial markets has focused on a special set of assumptions: agents have exponential utility, and random variables are normally distributed. These assumptions are often necessary to obtain closed-form solutions. We present an example with alternative assumptions, and demonstrate that some of the conclusions from previous literature fail to hold. In particular, we show that in our example, as more agents acquire information, prices do not necessarily become more informative, and agents may have greater incentive to acquire information. Learning can therefore be a strategic complement, allowing for the possibility of multiple equilibria.     

Towards a More Complete Efficiency Wage Theory

The efficiency wage is an important topic in the theory of employment. In a traditional efficiency wage model, only the representative firm is optimizing against an assumed S‐shaped effort supply function. This S‐shaped supply curve is critical for the model and the absence of a derivation of the curve in the literature means that it is an incomplete theory. In the present paper, we extend the model by specifying a worker's representative utility function so that the corresponding argmax function will be the S‐shaped effort supply curve. This will make the worker's decision process endogenous and will produce a more complete model. The importance of this extension is clear. The characterization of the utility function will make explicit the necessary conditions and crucial assumptions of the traditional model. More importantly, the extension will allow researchers to introduce employment compensation factors into the worker's utility function for analysis. This has important bearings on future development in employment theory. For example, a worker's satisfaction from shirking (net of dismissal risks), or his or her willingness to search for jobs (net of search cost), can now be included in his or her utility function to form an optimal work or search strategy. Incorporating the worker's optimization behaviour into the model will also enable researchers to study policy directed not just towards firms but also towards the worker's decision process. Furthermore, this approach provides a framework for researchers to generate comparative statics. These comparative statics can lead to interesting topics for econometric models or to further research within this field.     

Conditional preferences and updating

This paper axiomatizes updating rules for preferences that are not necessarily in the expected utility class. Two sets of results are presented. The first is the axiomatization of conditional preferences. The second consists of the axiomatization of three updating rules: the traditional Bayes rule, the Dempster-Shafer rule, and the generalized Bayes rule. The last rule can be regarded as the updating rule for the multi-prior expected utility (Gilboa and Schmeidler, J. Math. Econom. 18 (1989) 141). Operationally, it is equivalent to updating each prior by the traditional Bayes rule.