Jörg Gottschlich

A decision support system for stock investment recommendations using collective wisdom

Previous research has shown that user-generated stock votes from online communities can be valuable for investment decisions. However, to support investors on a day-to-day basis, there is a need for an efficient support system to facilitate the use of the data and to transform crowd votes into actionable investment opportunities. We propose a decision support system (DSS) design that enables investors to include the crowds recommendations in their investment decisions and use it to manage a portfolio. A prototype with two test scenarios shows the potential of the system as the portfolios recommended by the system clearly outperform the market benchmark and comparable public funds in the observation period in terms of absolute returns and with respect to the Reward-to-Variability-Ratio.

The Value of User's Facebook Profile Data for Product Recommendation Generation

Most online shops apply recommender systems, i.e. software agents that elicit the users’ preferences and interests with the purpose to make product recommendations. Many of these systems suffer from the new user cold start problem which occurs when no transaction history is available for the particular new prospective buyer. External data from social networking sites, like Facebook, seem promising to overcome this problem. In this paper, we evaluate the value of Facebook profile data to create meaningful product recommendations. We find based on the outcomes of a user experiment that already simple approaches and plain profile data matching yield significant better recommendations than a pure random draw from the product data base. However, the most successful approaches use semantic categories like music/video, brands and product category information to match profile and product data. A second experiment indicates that recommendation quality seems to be stable for different profile sizes.

Der Wert von sozialen Strukturdaten aus ökonomischer Sicht

Zurzeit schatzen Experten, dass Facebook bei einem Borsengang mit einer Marktkapitalisierung von 100 Mrd. US

The Value Of Users' Facebook Profile Data - Generating Product Recommendations For Online Social Shopping Sites

rechnen konnte (WSJ 2011). Zwar konnte Facebook seinen Umsatz im Wesentlichen durch den Verkauf von klassischer Online-Werbung in der ersten Halfte des Jahres 2011 verdoppeln, dennoch lasst sich der (prognostizierte) Unternehmenswert selbst bei einer ahnlich positiven weiteren Entwicklung kaum rechtfertigen. Investoren gehen offenbar davon aus, dass in Zukunft innovative Geschaftsmodelle zur Generierung von Erlosen gefunden werden.