Most past research on word-of-mouth (WOM) communication has focused on the attributes of the WOM sender, such as opinion leadership and innovativeness. However, since WOM communication involves the interaction of the sender and the receiver, it is important to examine the relationship between the two. Past research on personal influence which examines the relational context includes two contrad...

In online markets, Word-of-Mouth (WOM) plays a very important role in shoppers’ online purchasing decisions, especially for experience goods. Hotels, as a form of service product, are intangible and cannot be evaluated before consumption, which makes WOM even more important. Several studies focus on the influence of online WOM on business performance. However, little attention has so far been p...

This paper seeks to model the effect of word of mouth (WOM) on travel behavior. In particular it seeks to examine the effect of social networks on WOM amongst a population in the origin prior to travel. In this paper the effect of WOM is compared to that of paid advertising (ADV). In other words we simulate a situation in which a tourism operator (a hotel manager for example) wishes to understa...

In this paper, we propose a construction of non-binary WOM (Write-Once-Memory) codes for WOM storages such as flash memories. The WOM codes discussed in this paper are fixed rate WOM codes where messages in a fixed alphabet of size M can be sequentially written in the WOM storage at least t-times. In this paper, a WOM storage is modeled by a state transition graph. The proposed construction has...

Consumer choice is influenced in a direct and meaningful way by the actions taken by others. These “actions” range from face-to-face recommendations from a friend to the passive observation of what a stranger is wearing. We refer to the set of such contexts as “social interactions” (SI). We believe that at least some of the SI effects are partially within the firm’s control and that this repres...

Seeded marketing campaigns (SMCs) involve firms sending product samples to selected customers and encouraging them to spread word of mouth (WOM). Prior research has examined certain aspects of this increasingly popular form of marketing communication, such as seeding strategies and their immediate efficacy. Building on prior research, this study investigates the effects of SMCs that extend beyo...

This study examines the influence of self-presentation on brand-related word-of-mouth (WOM) and the moderating roles of gender and number of Facebook friends on the relationship between self-presentation and brand-related WOM. Data were collected from Facebook users (N = 400) via an online survey. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis revealed that self-presentation is positively related to...