Rotterdam Seminars Econometric Institute

Speaker(s)
Joachim Bueschken (Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany)
Date
Thursday, 28 November 2013
Location
Rotterdam

Firms collect an increasing amount of consumer feedback in the form of unstructured consumer reviews. These reviews contain text about
consumer experiences with products and services that are different from surveys that query consumers for specific information. A challenge
in analyzing unstructured consumer reviews is in making sense of the topics that are expressed in the words used to describe these experiences. We propose a new model for exploratory text analysis that makes use of the sentence structure contained in the reviews, and show that it leads to improved inference and prediction relative to existing models using data from www.expedia.com. The topics associated with different levels of satisfaction and hotel brands are found to different, more distinguished and more interpretable that those emerging from alternative analysis. (With G.M. Allenby)