Mining the peanut gallery: opinion extraction and semantic classification of product reviews
WWW '03 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on World Wide Web
Organizational Endowments and the Performance of University Start-ups
Management Science
Communications of the ACM - The Blogosphere
Computing Attitude and Affect in Text: Theory and Applications (The Information Retrieval Series)
Computing Attitude and Affect in Text: Theory and Applications (The Information Retrieval Series)
Thumbs up?: sentiment classification using machine learning techniques
EMNLP '02 Proceedings of the ACL-02 conference on Empirical methods in natural language processing - Volume 10
Using Online Conversations to Study Word-of-Mouth Communication
Marketing Science
When Online Reviews Meet Hyperdifferentiation: A Study of the Craft Beer Industry
Journal of Management Information Systems
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Network Externalities and Technology Use: A Quantitative Analysis of Intraorganizational Blogs
Journal of Management Information Systems
Blog, Blogger, and the Firm: Can Negative Employee Posts Lead to Positive Outcomes?
Information Systems Research
Information Systems Research
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In this paper, we study the differential influence of online user-generated content (UGC), specifically blogs, across the multiple stages of decision making of venture capitalists: screening stage, choice stage, and contract stage. We conjecture that, first, blogs are influential at the screening stage; second, after the screening stage, blogs are noninfluential since decision makers evaluate entities closely at later stages; third, blogs increase the interest from multiple decision makers which in turn increases the cost of the deal for a decision maker. This empirical investigation provides support for the hypotheses, which we tested for funding decisions by venture capitalists in information technology ventures. In particular, this study indicates that blogs can help managers in getting their products/services selected at the screening stage, but, beyond that, blogs do not help directly. However, since more decision makers screen products/services that receive blog coverage, the competition among decision makers helps managers in negotiating better contract terms. We advance the boundary of existing studies on the influence of UGC from single stage process to multiple stages.