Social Media and Firm Equity Value

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Luo, Xueming; Zhang, Jie; Duan, Wenjing
• 署名单位: University of Texas System; University of Texas Arlington; Fudan University; George Washington University
• 刊物名称: INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7047
• DOI: 10.1287/isre.1120.0462
• 发表日期: 2013
• 页码: 146-163
• 关键词: word-of-mouth; user-generated content; customer satisfaction; idiosyncratic risk; Intangible assets; capital-markets; product reviews; stock-market; online; sales

摘要

Companies have increasingly advocated social media technologies to transform businesses and improve organizational performance. This study scrutinizes the predictive relationships between social media and firm equity value, the relative effects of social media metrics compared with conventional online behavioral metrics, and the dynamics of these relationships. The results derived from vector autoregressive models suggest that social media-based metrics (Web blogs and consumer ratings) are significant leading indicators of firm equity value. Interestingly, conventional online behavioral metrics (Google searches and Web traffic) are found to have a significant yet substantially weaker predictive relationship with firm equity value than social media metrics. We also find that social media has a faster predictive value, i.e., shorter wear-in time, than conventional online media. These findings are robust to a consistent set of volume-based measures (total blog posts, rating volume, total page views, and search intensity). Collectively, this study proffers new insights for senior executives with respect to firm equity valuations and the transformative power of social media.