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Uncovering Causal Effects of Online Short Videos on Consumer Behaviors

Published: 15 February 2022 Publication History

Abstract

In recent years, online short videos have become more popular, especially as an online advertising intermediary. To better understand their effects as advertisements, it is essential to analyze the causal relations of online short videos on consumer behaviors. Our study is based on fine-grained consumer behavior data from a world-leading e-commerce platform, i.e., Taobao.com. We first decompose the total causal effects into informative effects and persuasive effects following a common practice in the economic literature. Moreover, we extract the subjectivity scores of short videos through a dictionary-based subjectivity analysis model and evaluate the correlation between the subjectivity scores and each causal effect. The findings of this paper are as follows: First, both causal effects (i.e., informative and persuasive effects) are significant. Second, these effects have a strong correlation with the short videos' subjectivity scores. Third, the signs of these correlations vary with the prices of the products. Our results not only shed light on the research of how short videos exert influence on online consumers, but also give sellers advice on better video design and recommendation.

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  • (2024)Multi-Behavior Recommendation with Personalized Directed Acyclic Behavior GraphsACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/369641743:1(1-30)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Analyzing and Predicting Consumer Response to Short Videos in E-CommerceACM Transactions on Management Information Systems10.1145/3690393Online publication date: 10-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Making Short-Form Videos Accessible with Hierarchical Video SummariesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642839(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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        cover image ACM Conferences
        WSDM '22: Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
        February 2022
        1690 pages
        ISBN:9781450391320
        DOI:10.1145/3488560
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Published: 15 February 2022

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        Author Tags

        1. advertising effects
        2. doubly robust
        3. short video
        4. video subjectivity

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        View all
        • (2024)Multi-Behavior Recommendation with Personalized Directed Acyclic Behavior GraphsACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/369641743:1(1-30)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2024
        • (2024)Analyzing and Predicting Consumer Response to Short Videos in E-CommerceACM Transactions on Management Information Systems10.1145/3690393Online publication date: 10-Sep-2024
        • (2024)Making Short-Form Videos Accessible with Hierarchical Video SummariesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642839(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
        • (2024)CausalTAD: Causal Implicit Generative Model for Debiased Online Trajectory Anomaly Detection2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00341(4477-4490)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
        • (2024)Stable Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation across Out-of-Distribution Populations2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00091(1117-1130)Online publication date: 13-May-2024

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