The dissertation thesis is concentrated on newsletter creation and its productivity evaluation. According to the information analysis from the field of email marketing, advertisement psychology and other knowledge, new proposals of new newsletter have been developed. These proposals went through testing using eye cameras - the eye tracking. Out of the partial proposals has been made a final newsletter which was sent out to customers by the company and the results have been evaluated in comparison with the previous one. The thesis also serves as a guideline for companies working on newsletter creation and its use.

This thesis aims to utilize data analysis and predictive modeling techniques and apply them in different domains for gaining insights. The topics were chosen keeping the same in mind. Analysis of customer interests is a crucial factor in present marketing trends and hence we worked on twitter data which is a significant part of digital marketing. Neuroscience, especially psychological behavior, is an important research area. We chose eye tracking data based on which we differentiated human concentration while watching controllable (video game) videos and uncontrollable (sports) videos. Currently, cities are using data analysis for becoming smart cities. We worked on the City of Lewisville emergency services data and predicted the vehicle-accident-prone areas for development of precautionary measures in those areas.

Small business owners who fail to apply effective Internet marketing strategies could negatively affect customers' purchasing decisions, and business profitability and sustainability. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore effective Internet marketing strategies online fashion jewelry business owners used to maintain or increase profit levels. Competitive advantage theory was the conceptual framework for the study. Data were collected via semistructured interviews with 3 online fashion jewelry business owners located in the northeastern region of the United States who were in the same business for more than 5 years and generated at least $100,000 in annual revenue. Additionally, data were collected with a review of company documents pertaining to the profit levels of the businesses. Data were analyzed using word frequency and coding to determine themes. Six key themes emerged from the data: (a) Internet marketing strategies, (b) social media marketing strategies, (c) market research and retargeting strategies, (d) brand building strategies, (e) e-mail marketing strategies, and (f) marketing strategies for customer relationship management. The implications of this study for positive social change include the potential to create jobs and economic growth. The findings of this study could increase the quality of life for stay-at-home parents or assist disadvantaged individuals who host online businesses by offering proven Internet marketing strategies to increase their business longevity, profitability, and potentially lead to stronger and safer communities.

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Social media influencers are online content creators who seek audience support, form relationships with their audiences, and shape audience interests, opinions, and behavior. Not only is the influencer economy a cultural market in its own right, but it is also increasingly shaping other cultural industries as influencers serve as cultural gatekeepers who filter cultural products for their audiences (Hirsch, 1972). As social media influencers become powerful gatekeepers and producers, the relational nature of their activities and performance is reshaping norms in cultural industries overall. Lay audiences gain more influence and agency as their evaluations and support are critical for influencer survival and success. Then how has the evaluative landscape in cultural industries changed, and what are the broader social implications of these changes? In this dissertation, I outline the rise of social media influencers both as gatekeepers and producers in cultural markets and argue that scholarship in management and sociology must examine the unique ways in which these influencers’ activities differ from their predecessors’. Chapter 1 defines social media influencers and describes their activities and market dynamics by comparing and contrasting them to their traditional counterparts. Chapter 2 examines the relationship between influencer-audience relational interactions and performance outcomes, focusing on influencers’ role as cultural gatekeepers. Chapter 3 looks at the effects of race and race-based social movements on influencer-audience interactions, highlighting influencers’ role as cultural producers. In all three chapters, the focus is on the sociological theory of relational work, which is the process through which economic actors balance the transactional and social components of their relationships (Zelizer, 2012; Bandelj, 2020). Social media influencers serve as an ideal type to demonstrate how relational work contributes to market value and performance, given the tight balance between their relational and transactional activities. I use mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze channel-, video-, and comment-level data on 1,167 BookTubers (YouTube influencers who evaluate books). I find that social media influencers indeed serve as trusted gatekeepers for their audiences, and that audiences demand not only evaluative content, but also intimate relationships with influencers. Influencers use audience interactions as relational work efforts to build trusting relationships with audiences and gain their support, but this effect is moderated by the perceived trustworthiness of the influencer. The effectiveness of influencer relational work also varies by race, and relational work thus reproduces racialized logics that underlie cultural markets. In sum, this dissertation not only highlights the rise of an important new market actor, but also contributes to theories on how relational work shapes and is shaped by inequality.

This dissertation is a compilation of three essays that analyze price dispersion in an online retail marketplace. Price dispersion is a measure of the variation in prices that sellers charge for products. Online price dispersion has been thoroughly analyzed in the past decade as it has numerous implications for firm pricing strategy as well as consumer welfare. Chapter 1 of this dissertation offers a literature review of price dispersion research, and discusses key explanations as to why this phenomenon exists on the web. Also, a literature review of shop-bots is presented as they are similar to online marketplaces and form the basis of the three studies. Chapter 2 is the first study, and it establishes the existence of price dispersion in online marketplaces and offers a comparison with price dispersion in shop-bots. It is determined that online marketplaces may have less variation than on shop-bots, yet the price dispersion is still high. Chapter 3 is the second study and it explains much of the dispersion found in the online marketplace through differences in seller service quality and seller reputation. A seller's reputation was found to be the key contributor to variation in the online marketplace hence, study 3, which is chapter 4 of this dissertation, employs an experimental approach designed to offer a perspective of buyers and sellers to determine why price varies with reputation and if consumers value the reputation score. It was determined that buyers prefer sellers with strong long run reputation scores more than sellers with strong short-term reputation scores. Based on these reputation scores sellers want to try to offer a higher price than consumers are willing to pay, and sellers think that a strong score conveys higher levels of trust than buyers believe. This mismatch between how sellers think consumers respond, and how the consumers actually respond could be another driver of price dispersion online. A discussion of the implications of these research studies is offered in Chapter 5. / Business Administration

This thesis focuses on learning from revealed preferences and their implications across operations management problems through an Inverse Problem perspective. For the first part of the thesis, we focus on decentralized platforms facilitating many-to-many matches between two sides of a marketplace. In the absence of direct matching, inefficiency in market outcomes can easily arise. For instance, popular supply agents may garner many units from the demand side, while other supply units may not receive any match. A central question for the platform is how to manage congestion and improve market outcomes. In Chapter One, we study the impact of a detail-free lever: the disclosure of information to agents on current competition levels. How large are the effects of this lever, and how do they affect overall market outcomes? We answer this question empirically. We partner with the largest service marketplace in Latin America, which sells non-exclusive labor market leads to workers. The key innovation in our approach is the proposal of a structural model that allows agents (workers) to respond to competitors through beliefs about competition at the lead level, which in turn implies an equilibrium at the platform level under the assumption of rational expectations. In this problem, we observe agents' best responses (actions), and from that, we need to infer their structural parameters. Identification follows from an exogenous intervention that changes agents' contextual information and the platform equilibrium. We then conduct counterfactual analyses to study the impact of signaling competition on workers' lead purchasing decisions, the platform's revenue, and the expected number of matches. We find that signaling competition is a powerful lever for the platform to reduce congestion, redirect demand, and ultimately improve the expected number of matches for the markets we analyze. For the second part of the thesis, we discuss both parametric and modelling approaches in Inverse Problems. In Chapter Two, we focus on Inverse Optimization Problems in a single-agent setting. Specifically, we study offline and online contextual optimization with feedback information, where instead of observing the loss, we observe, after-the-fact, the optimal action an oracle with full knowledge of the objective function would have taken. We aim to minimize regret, which is defined as the difference between our losses and the ones incurred by an all-knowing oracle. In the offline setting, the decision-maker has information available from past periods and needs to make one decision, while in the online setting, the decision-maker optimizes decisions dynamically over time based on a new set of feasible actions and contextual functions in each period. For the offline setting, we characterize the optimal minimax policy, establishing the performance that can be achieved as a function of the underlying geometry of the information induced by the data. In the online setting, we leverage this geometric characterization to optimize the cumulative regret. We develop an algorithm that yields the first regret bound for this problem, which is logarithmic in the time horizon. Furthermore, we show via simulation that our proposed algorithms outperform previous methods from the literature. Finally, in Chapter Three, we consider data-driven methods for general Inverse Problem formulations under a statistical framework (Statistical Inverse Problem-SIP) and demonstrate how Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithms can be used to solve linear SIP. We provide consistency and finite sample bounds for the excess risk. We exemplify the algorithm in the Functional Linear Regression setting with an empirical application in predicting illegal activity from bitcoin wallets. We also discuss additional applications and extensions.

Online marketing communication provides some of the cutting edge tools that can be used by guest houses to communicate their product and service offerings. The purpose of this study was to determine which online marketing communication tools can be used, and are in fact currently used by guest houses in Pretoria East. The results obtained from this study can assist guest house owner/managers in Pretoria East with decision-making on the communication of off-line and online marketing communication tools to be included in their marketing strategy. Primary data was collected by means of a survey with guest house owners/managers in Pretoria East. Specific corpographic details of guest houses in Pretoria East were identified. Furthermore, the most frequently used off-line and online marketing communication tools were identified, as well as the number of guest houses that have websites and the content of these websites. The findings suggest that guest houses in Pretoria East have to invest more time and money in implementing certain online marketing communication tools, such as social networking and use of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). By implementing online marketing communication tools like these, guest houses in Pretoria East could enhance customers‟ awareness of a guest house. This study verified the importance of electronic tools such as the Internet and Web as an integral part of an organisation‟s marketing strategy, specifically for small businesses in the service sector, such as guest houses. / Business Management / M. Com. (Business Management)

by Fu Chi Pang, Wei Hong, Wilson. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 37-38). / ABSTRACT --- p.ii / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.iv / Chapter / Chapter I. --- BUSINESS OBJECTIVE --- p.1 / Chapter II. --- INTERNET INDUSTRY OVERVIEW --- p.2 / Development of the Internet Population --- p.2 / World Wide Web --- p.3 / Asia-Pacific Internet Growth Opportunities --- p.4 / Key Internet Business Opportunities --- p.6 / Advertising --- p.6 / E-commerce --- p.6 / Market Potential --- p.7 / Hong Kong --- p.8 / Chapter III. --- PRODUCT --- p.10 / Love Matching --- p.10 / Love Chat Room --- p.11 / Love Card --- p.11 / Love Web Page --- p.11 / Love Test --- p.12 / Love Horoscope --- p.12 / Love Weekend --- p.12 / Love Flower --- p.13 / Love Restaurant --- p.13 / Love Travel & Hotel --- p.13 / Love Wedding --- p.14 / Love Doctor --- p.14 / Chapter IV. --- COMPETITOR ANALYSIS --- p.15 / Uniqueness of ILove.com --- p.16 / Chapter V. --- MARKETING --- p.18 / Target Market --- p.18 / Launching Plan --- p.19 / Follow-up Plan --- p.20 / Chapter VI. --- "REVENUE, COST & RETURN" --- p.21 / Revenue --- p.21 / Short Term --- p.21 / Long Term --- p.22 / Cost --- p.23 / Equipment and Facility Costs --- p.24 / Human Resources and Office Rental Cost --- p.26 / Human Resources Expenditure --- p.26 / Office Rental Cost --- p.27 / Total Operating Cost --- p.28 / Advertising Cost --- p.28 / Return --- p.29 / Breakeven Analysis --- p.29 / Chapter VII. --- MISCELLANEOUS --- p.32 / Membership Registration --- p.32 / Payment Mechanism --- p.32 / APPENDIX --- p.34 / BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.37 / ILOVE'S WEB SITE LAYOUT --- p.39

by Lou Suk-Yee. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references. / EXECUTIVE SUMMARY --- p.i / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.iv / Chapter / Chapter 1. --- BACKGROUND --- p.1 / Study Objectives --- p.1 / Scope --- p.2 / Methodology --- p.2 / Chapter 2. --- INTRODUCTION --- p.4 / Chapter 3. --- BASICS OF DIRECT MARKETING --- p.6 / Direct Response --- p.6 / Direct Mail --- p.6 / Telemarketing --- p.7 / Chapter 4. --- RETAILING ON THE INTERNET --- p.8 / Consumer Involvement --- p.8 / Interactive Marketing Model --- p.9 / Two-step Marketing Model --- p.9 / Categories of Vendors on the Internet --- p.10 / Benefits of Internet Shopping --- p.13 / Arguments Against Internet Shopping --- p.16 / Chapter 5. --- INTERNET SHOPPING IN THE US --- p.20 / Web Citizen Demographics and Preferences --- p.20 / Online Shopping in the US --- p.21 / US Internet Shoppers Profile --- p.22 / Chapter 6. --- INTERNET SHOPPING IN HONG KONG --- p.26 / Hong Kong: A Unique Market --- p.26 / Web Citizen Demographics --- p.28 / Consumer Attitudes --- p.28 / Hong Kong Merchants on the Internet --- p.33 / Chapter 7. --- THE FUTURE OF INTERNET SHOPPING --- p.42 / Infrastructure --- p.42 / Software --- p.42 / Payment System --- p.43 / Fulfillment System --- p.44 / Local/ Regional Search Engines --- p.44 / Chapter 8. --- CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS --- p.46 / Conclusions --- p.46 / Recommendations --- p.47 / Chapter APPENDIX 1 : --- QUESTIONNAIRE --- p.48 / Chapter APPENDIX 2 : --- PROFILE OF RESPONDENTS --- p.55 / Chapter APPENDIX 3 : --- HONG KONG MERCHANTS ON THE INTERNET --- p.59 / Chapter APPENDIX 4 : --- """ONLINE SHOPPING HONG KONG"" SEARCH RESULTS" --- p.65 / Chapter APPENDIX 5 : --- SAMPLES OF WEB SITES FROM HONG KONG MERCHANTS