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Spiral of hatred: social effects in Internet auctions. Between informativity and emotion

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Abstract

An auction platform is a dynamic environment where a rich variety of social effects can be observed. Most of those effects remain unnoticed or even hidden to ordinary users. The in-depth studies of such effects should allow us to identify and understand the key factors influencing users’ behaviour. The material collected from the biggest Polish auction house has been analyzed. NLP algorithms were applied to extract sentiment-related content from collected comments and to measure informativity. Emotional distance between negative, neutral and positive comments has been calculated. The obtained results confirm the existence of the spiral-of-hatred effect but also indicate that much more complex patterns of mutual relations between sellers and buyers exist. The last section contains a several suggestions which can prove useful to improve trustworthiness of users’ reports and security of an auction platform in general.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Polish Japanese Institute of Information Technology, ul. Koszykowa 86, 02-008, Warszawa, Poland

    Radoslaw Nielek & Adam Wierzbicki

  2. Institute of Computer Science Polish Academy of Sciences, ul. J.K. Ordona 21, 01-237, Warszawa, Poland

    Aleksander Wawer

Authors
  1. Radoslaw Nielek
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  2. Aleksander Wawer
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  3. Adam Wierzbicki
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Radoslaw Nielek.

Additional information

This research has been supported by the Polish Ministry of Science grant N N516 4307 33.

A. Wierzbicki has been supported by the grant of the Polish Ministry of Science 69/N-SINGAPUR/2007/0.

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Nielek, R., Wawer, A. & Wierzbicki, A. Spiral of hatred: social effects in Internet auctions. Between informativity and emotion. Electron Commer Res 10, 313–330 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-010-9058-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-010-9058-9

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