Going Down with the Sinking Ship Smiling: Sentiment Analysis of overconfidence in a Web Forum of a Financial Institution
Abstract
Research on decision making has focused on real-world organizations and environments. Virtual environments, however, are increasingly prominent. Within virtual environments, web-forums are both a common means to gather information and a tool to make decisions. This research analyzes the pattern of decision making behavior as expressed through an analysis of sentiments. One specific aspect of human behavior, overconfidence in decision making, is assessed by analyzing 20,000 topics extracted from a web forum of a financial institution on the Google Finance discussion board. The results of the study reveal that, when a financial institution market goes down, the members of a virtual environment pay more attention to web forum information. In addition, the analysis suggests that overconfidence can be a crucial decision making factor in a virtual environment.
Recommended Citation
Storey, V. C., Almohri, S. M., Aryal, A., Chen, L., & For full list of authors, see publisher's website (2013). Going Down with the Sinking Ship Smiling: Sentiment Analysis of overconfidence in a Web Forum of a Financial Institution. Proceedings of the 23rd Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (2013, Milan, Italy) Social Science Research Network.
Meeting Name
23rd Workshop on Information Technology and Systems: Leveraging Big Data Analytics for Societal Benefits, WITS 2013 (2013: Dec. 14-15, Milan, Italy)
Department(s)
Business and Information Technology
Keywords and Phrases
Decision making; Overconfidence; Sentiment analysis; Stock price; Virtual environment; Web forums
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2013 Social Science Research Network, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
01 Dec 2013