Zhongming Ma

Mining competitor relationships from online news: A network-based approach

Identifying competitors is important for businesses. We present an approach that uses graph-theoretic measures and machine learning techniques to infer competitor relationships on the basis of structure of an intercompany network derived from company citations (cooccurrence) in online news articles. We also estimate to what extent our approach complements the commercial company profile data sources, such as Hoovers and Mergent.

Achieving mass customization through trust‐driven information sharing: a supplier's perspective

Purpose - Trust is essential for business relationships within a supply chain, and information sharing provides a key means to improve the efficiency of a supply chain. The purpose of this paper is to test empirically the relationship between trust and manufacturer-supplier information sharing to determine its (positive) effect on mass customization. Design/methodology/approach - The data come from 208 firms in North America and China. Structural equation modeling supports the data analysis. Findings - The results suggest that high mutual trust can lead to free information sharing between suppliers and manufacturers, which in turn leads to improved mass customization capabilities. In addition, cultural differences have significant moderating effects on the relationship between trust and information sharing. Originality/value - The study described in this paper measures mutual trust between manufacturers and suppliers and regards information sharing as the free flow of information, both to and from the manufacturer and supplier.

Examining Comparative Shopping Agents from Two Types of Search Results

A search engine provides two distinct types of results, organic and paid, each of which uses different mechanisms for selecting and ranking relevant web pages for a query. A comparative shopping agent (CSA), such as a price comparison website, conveniently provides web consumers with companies that sell desired product and the prices they offer on one page, which greatly reduces search costs. We identify 168 digital camera models from seven major camera makers, manually search each of the models in a popular search engine, empirically compare CSAs between the two types of search results in terms of the number of CSAs, number of vendors inside CSAs, lowest and average prices, and price dispersion. The paid results contain more CSAs and vendors than do organic results; vendors inside CSAs in paid results offer the lowest prices more often than do companies from CSAs in organic results; the average price for vendors in CSAs from paid results is not significant lower than that from companies in CSAs from organic results; the price dispersion among vendors in CSAs is greater from paid results than from organic results. In addition, companies with unsatisfactory ratings offer the lowest prices and lower average prices more often than do companies with satisfactory ratings.

The dynamics of Wikipedia article revisions: an analysis of revision activities and patterns

To study the dynamics of revision activities of Wikipedia articles, we define 14 revision actions, annotate 6,950 revisions from 20 articles in four quality ranks (C, B, GA, and FA), and analyse revisions and revision actions in ten consecutive time periods. We identify four revision patterns: 1) revision actions at the sentence and link levels appear in similar paces; 2) the numbers of revision actions at sentence and link levels comparatively evenly grow with the articles age prior to the last time period; 3) the paces of media and reference-level actions tend to be lagged behind sentence and link-level actions; 4) before being promoted to the GA or FA rank, articles nominated to the GA or FA rank exhibit a significant rising pattern in amounts of revisions and revision actions. This pattern is validated with a larger set of 533 articles.