Rachel is a Global Leadership Scholar in our Business Honors Program. Today she presented her thesis entitled 'Evaluating Prediction Models for Targeting Product Reviewers', which has been awarded with the Gold ORE Undergraduate Research Excellence Award . It has been a pleasure advising an excellent student such as Rachel. Many thanks also go to recent graduates of our Masters program, Ryan Erwin and Miller Moore, for their help in this project.
Here is the abstract of the paper:
'As customers increasingly rely on product reviews while making their purchases, businesses must take action and make obtaining high review volume a priority. The purpose of this study is to develop a predictive model that identifies if an online reviewer is likely to write a review for a selected product. To develop our model, we extracted product reviewer data from Amazon.com and applied a random forest algorithm. The model was significantly accurate when predicting if an individual would be likely to review the selected product. It can be used by a wide array of businesses to identify those customers likely to write a review, then businesses can target that population and obtain high review volume for their investment. Thorough research has been published investigating product reviews but we have focused our study on the individuals behind the reviews. Our model gives businesses the ability to improve review volume on specified products and in turn, increase sales (e.g., Chevalier and Mayzlin 2006; Ho-Dac, Carson, and Moore 2013).'
Rachel delivered a very strong presentation, and there were very interesting questions afterwards. Here are some pictures of the presentation. Congratulations Rachel!
