This is an open online academic seminar focusing on topics related to quantitative marketing.
The schedule is available as a Google calendar and you can sign up to receive updates here.Â
Please contact the organizers at virtualquantmark@googlegroups.com if you have any questions.
The Zoom link for all of the talks is: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/93394346729?pwd=SoVXVesbltpYbQxo9tbbPF6YgopDl3.1
We will post some recordings of talks at this channel and a full list of previous talks is available here.
Monday May 11, Noon ET - Dante Donati (Columbia)
The Influence of the Vocal Minority: Evidence from Social Media Comments
Abstract: Comment sections on social media extend social influence beyond offline networks, allowing a small, vocal minority of users to reach much larger audiences. We provide causal evidence that the views expressed in comments below social media posts shape both on-platform engagement and off-platform attitudes and behavior, and that these effects move in opposite directions. In collaboration with a leading racial justice organization, we conduct a large-scale field experiment on Facebook reaching a million U.S. users randomly assigned to one of four conditions: (i) no visible comments (control), (ii) opposing, (iii) supportive, and (iv) mixed comments dis- playing both stances. Opposing comments increase reactions, comments, and link clicks by roughly 15-45% relative to the control, whereas supportive comments have little effect. A complementary survey experiment with 5,000 participants shows that the same opposing comments shift attitudes in a less progressive direction and reduce donations to the organization by 7.3%. These results reveal a fundamental trade-off: the same comments that increase on-platform engagement undermine off-platform influence.
The seminars will last for 60 minutes with less formal conversation afterwards.
45 minutes of presentation
15 minutes of discussion.
Optional: speaker stays in Zoom for less formal conversation after the talk.
We also often invite additional panelists with expertise relevant to the talk to ask questions during the talk.
Please email the organizers if you'd like to be considered for a seminar talk. Please include an extended abstract or a working paper.
Yufeng Huang (Rochester), Zhenling Jiang (Wharton UPenn), Emaad Manzoor (Cornell), Olivia Natan (Berkeley), Hortense Fong (Columbia), Avner Strulov-Shlain (Booth)
Founding team: Dean Eckles (MIT Sloan), Andrey Fradkin (BU Questrom), Ayelet Israeli (HBS), Andrey Simonov (CBS), Raluca Ursu (NYU Stern)
virtualquantmark@googlegroups.com