Desamparados Blazquez

Inferring export orientation from corporate websites

The purpose of this article is to infer indicators about the export orientation of firms from the analysis of their corporate websites. Using a data set of manufacturing firms, two logistic regressions were performed and compared: one considering some firm structural variables, and another considering some web-based variables. Results showed that the website features are good predictors of the export orientation of firms, performing as well as the classic economic variables.

Monitoring e-commerce adoption from online data

The purpose of this paper is to propose an intelligent system to automatically monitor the firms’ engagement in e-commerce by analyzing online data retrieved from their corporate websites. The design of the proposed system combines web content mining and scraping techniques with learning methods for Big Data. Corporate websites are scraped to extract more than 150 features related to the e-commerce adoption, such as the presence of some keywords or a private area. Then, these features are taken as input by a classification model that includes dimensionality reduction techniques. The system is evaluated with a data set consisting of 426 corporate websites of firms based in France and Spain. The system successfully classified most of the firms into those that adopted e-commerce and those that did not, reaching a classification accuracy of 90.6%. This demonstrates the feasibility of monitoring e-commerce adoption from online data. Moreover, the proposed system represents a cost-effective alternative to surveys as method for collecting e-commerce information from companies, and is capable of providing more frequent information than surveys and avoids the non-response errors. This is the first research work to design and evaluate an intelligent system to automatically detect e-commerce engagement from online data. This proposal opens up the opportunity to monitor e-commerce adoption at a large scale, with highly granular information that otherwise would require every firm to complete a survey. In addition, it makes it possible to track the evolution of this activity in real time, so that governments and institutions could make informed decisions earlier.

Preface: 2nd International Conference on Higher Education Advances, HEAd´16, 21-23 June 2016, València, Spain

© 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of HEAd´16

Automatic detection of e-commerce availability from web data

In the transition to the digital economy, the implementation of e-commerce strategies contributes to foster economic growth and obtain competitive advantages. Indeed, national and supranational statistics offices monitor the adoption of e-commerce solutions by conducting periodic surveys to businesses. However, the information about e-commerce adoption is often available online in each company corporate website, which is usually public and suitable for being automatically retrieved and processed. In this context, this work proposes and develops an intelligent system for automatically detecting and monitoring e-commerce availability by analyzing data retrieved from corporate websites. This system combines web scraping techniques with some learning methods for Big Data, and has been evaluated with a data set consisting of 426 corporate websites of manufacturing firms based in France and Spain. Results show that the proposed model reaches a classification precision of about 85% in the test set. A more detailed analysis evidences that websites with e-commerce tend to include some specific keywords and have a private area. Our proposal opens up the opportunity to monitor e-commerce adoption at a large scale, with highly granular information that otherwise would have required every firm to complete a survey.

Business Export Orientation Detection through Web Content Analysis

Economic indicators are essential for economic studies, forecasts and economic policy designs. To meet their objective, they should be available in a frequent and timely fashion. However, official data are usually released with a long delay. Web-based economic indicators can be made available on real-time basis, thus contributing to alleviate this lag. Across all the economic indicators, those related to the export orientation of the companies are particularly interesting because of the growing importance of international trade to most developed countries.