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Products and services valuation through unsolicited information from social media

Abstract:

Technological advances and the Internet have changed the way consumers approach the market for assets and services. Increasingly, consumers use the opinions of others to make their decisions. Web sites have assessment indexes (ORIs, ORS), where consumers value products/services using discrete-value scales, like stars or likes. But these ways of assessing are being questioned for several reasons such as the answers’ reliability, and the opinions representativeness and aggregation. Lack of reliability is since opinions are requested directly, which makes possible the paradox of the strategic aspect of decisions. Representativeness and aggregation problems are owing to an important loss of decisions information when using a single value, instead of using the interval that includes all feelings/opinions, as well as preferences cardinality in the aggregation that somehow reinforce those assessments. The aim of this work is to propose an index for products/services evaluation over the Internet. This index, called Quorum Valuation Opinion Reputation Index, takes unsolicited information from consumers, and through a semantic analysis and a majority aggregation process, builds a valuation interval. In addition, an opinion interval reliability index is proposed. The index has been tested with real data in the tourism field.