Social media treats all users the same: trusted friend or total stranger, with little or nothing in between. In reality, relationships fall everywhere along this spectrum, a topic social science has investigated for decades under the theme of tie strength. Our work bridges this gap between theory and practice. In this paper, we present a predictive model that maps social media data to tie strength. The model builds on a dataset of over 2,000 social media ties and performs quite well, distinguishing between strong and weak ties with over 85% accuracy. We complement these quantitative findings with interviews that unpack the relationships we could not predict. The paper concludes by illustrating how modeling tie strength can improve social media design elements, including privacy controls, message routing, friend introductions and information prioritization.

/pdf/predicting-tie-strength-with-social-media-ylliogptas.pdf

Predicting tie strength with social media

Predicting green product consumption using theory of planned behavior and reasoned action

Two aspects of international marketing strategy standardization are process and program standardization. A framework for determining marketing program standardization is introduced. Factors affecti...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1251525.pdf

Standardization of International Marketing Strategy: Some Research Hypotheses:

Many researchers have pointed out that it is necessary to ensure measurement equivalence in cross-national comparative research. Three aspects of measurement equivalence, translation, metric, and calibration equivalence, are necessary to establish the cross-national reliability and validity of items used to measure theoretical constructs. This paper discusses these issues and proposes two recently developed empirical techniques, Multiple Group LISREL and Optimal Scaling, for use in diagnosing cross-national measurement equivalence. These techniques are illustrated by reanalysis of a pioneering U.S. and Japanese study. The two techniques yield convergent results, indicating measurement equivalence for some, but not all, ordinal-level items under consideration. The findings demonstrate that the proposed methods are useful diagnostic tools for exploring measurement equivalence. Several suggestions for reducing the likelihood of problems with measurement equivalence and a number of methods for dealing with items where lack of equivalence persists are also discussed.

http://www.rcmewhu.com/upload/file/20150528/20150528101814_7576.pdf

Diagnosing Measurement Equivalence in Cross-National Research

The authors address a key controversy in the marketing literature about the suitability of global standardization. An empirical investigation of the differences between firms that emphasize global ...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1252038.pdf

The influence of global marketing standardization on performance

To date, there have been relatively few attempts to integrate the cultural dimension into knowledge of consumer behavior. This paper focuses on the cross-cultural dimension of family purchasing roles. We discuss a theory developed by Rodman (1972) that attempts to place the findings of marital power studies in cultural context; introduce an analytical technique called correspondence analysis that can be used to analyze family decision-making data collected across cultures; and present the results of a five-nation family decision-making study to illustrate how Rodman's theory and correspondence analysis can be employed in cross-cultural research.

Societal Development and Family Purchasing Roles: A Cross-National Study

The changing role of women in U.S. society will be manifested in several aspects of male-female behavior. This study compares family decision-making patterns under different conditions of female ro...

Feminine Role Perception and Family Purchasing Decisions

International advertisers are often faced with the problem of whether and to what extent they should change their messages from one country to another. Some advertisers feel that messages can be standardized across countries, while others believe adaptation is usually necessary. The study reported in this paper tests the acceptability of standardized advertising. Groups of consumers from three foreign countries are tested to determine whether they perceive the same product attributes important in the purchase of two common convenience products as a comparable group of consumers in the United States. The findings indicate substantial and consistent differences between the Americans and the other groups which suggest the inadvisability of standardized global advertising in these cases and perhaps in general.

The effectiveness of standardized global advertising

Researchers who gather data from several different groups are frequently faced with the problem of response set bias. This paper discusses the ipsative process, a technique which can reduce systematic response bias which exists between groups in a study. The usefulness of the ipsative process is illustrated on cross-cultural research findings gathered in four countries. William H. Cunningham is Associate Professor of Marketing Administration, Isabella C. M. Cunningham is Associate Professor of Advertising, and Robert T. Green is Associate Professor of Marketing Administration, at the University of Texas at Austin. The authors would like to thank Professor Donald J. Veldman of the University of Texas at Austin for his help with this research. POQ 41 (1977) 379-384 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.246 on Tue, 27 Sep 2016 04:53:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 380 CUNNINGHAM, ET AL. The Ipsative Measure When data are ipsatized, an individual's score on each variable is dependent on his score on the other variables. The mathematical definition of ipsative data is: "Any score matrix, which has the property that the sum of the scores over the attributes for each of the entities is a constant" (Clemans, 1956). Any data matrix may be made ipsative by adding the appropriate value to each subject's responses such that all of the subject's scores will sum to the same number. This key value is determined by summing the scores in the row and then subtracting a constant from the sum of the variables and dividing the remainder by the number of variables. As an example, assume that an individual had scores on three variables of 75, 35, and 85. To ipsatize these data the scores would first be summed to 195. A constant, for example 100, is subtracted from 195 and the remainder is divided by 3. As a result 31.7 is subtracted from each of the original scores on the three variables. The subject's ipsatized values would therefore equal 43.3, 3.3, and 53.3. To ipsatize an entire primary data matrix this procedure would be followed for each individual in the sample. In order for the ipsative process to be meaningful, however, the researcher must standardize the data both before and after ipsatizing. Thus, the entire process would involve three steps. First, the primary data matrix must be standardized by columns to force each variable to a common base. As a result, each variable may be compared with every other variable without any bias that would arise from variations in the means and standard deviations of the variable. Second, the standard score matrix is ipsatized in the manner presented above. At this point, the ipsative scores make it possible to compare an individual's relative score on each variable with his score on other variables. Finally, if the objective of research is to compare one individual with another or two sets of individuals with each other, the ipsative scores must be transformed into standard scores by columns. Since the usual objective of the ipsative process is to be able to compare groups of individuals across a set of variables, this final data manipulation is normally needed (Clemans, 1956:5-7).

The Ipsative Process to Reduce Response Set Bias

This study investigated the possible effect of television program types on the recall performance of humorous television commercials. An experimental design was developed to test the relative performance of the same humorous and non-humorous ads in three different contextual environments—situation comedy, action/adventure, and documentary. The findings indicate that the recall performance of commercials and of the product or service promoted are both affected by the program environment within which the ads appear.

Isabella C. M. Cunningham

Papers

Societal Development and Family Purchasing Roles: A Cross-National Study

Feminine Role Perception and Family Purchasing Decisions

The effectiveness of standardized global advertising

The Ipsative Process to Reduce Response Set Bias

The Impact of Program Environment on Recall of Humorous Television Commercials