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Department of Information, Operations and Management Sciences

Department of Management Science and Technology

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Panagiotis (Panos) Adamopoulos is the Goizueta Foundation Term Chair Associate Professor of Information Systems at the Goizueta Business School of Emory University.

Panos' research program studies how information systems and digital technologies shape user behavior and transform businesses and society. His research focuses on personalization, mobile and social commerce, and online education. Recent projects examine the influence of fake reviews on recommender systems and strategies to mitigate their effects; how to alleviate the over-specialization and concentration bias of personalization techniques (e.g., filter bubbles);  the effectiveness of various types of mobile recommendations; the role of personality traits in shaping the influence of social media word-of-mouth (WOM); and how to design better massive open online courses (MOOCs). Much of this research is grounded in big data employing data science and machine-learning techniques to leverage the abundance of unstructured data, while integrating these methods with more conventional econometric analysis as well as experimental research designs.

His research has been published in top peer-reviewed outlets, including Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Production and Operations Management, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, and ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. In addition, his work has received multiple honors, including INFORMS and AIS mid-career, young scholar, and early career awards, Marketing Science Institute, and Amazon research grants, INFORMS and ACM best paper award nominations, teaching commendations and a variety of other grants. Panos has also served as an associate editor for MS and an organizing and program committee member for international conferences and workshops as well as a reviewer for several scholarly journals and conferences. He has been recognized for the above service with best associate editor and reviewer awards and nominations.

Before academia, Panos worked as a senior Business Intelligence Engineer and Consultant at Relational S.A. and as an Information Technology Business Analyst at Toyota. He holds a Ph.D. from the Stern School of Business of New York University and a B.Sc. from the Department of Management Science and Technology of the Athens University of Economics and Business, where he graduated 2nd in the department’s history.

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Information Systems

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Social Commerce

Word of Mouth

Internet of Things

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How Will the Internet of Things Affect Retailing?

Estimating the Impact of User Personality Traits on Electronic Word-of-Mouth: Text-mining Social Media Platforms

Why Companies Invest in Local Social Media Influencers

In this paper, we examine whether latent personality traits of online users accentuate or attenuate the effectiveness of WOM in social media platforms.

The Impact of User Personality Traits on Word of Mouth: Text-Mining Social Media Platforms

Certainly, marketers are well aware of the value of the consumers’ word-of-mouth (WOM) endorsements of a product or service. But the ubiquitous nature of social media demands that advertisers find new ways to tap into how consumers interact and communicate to leverage the power of WOM online. Panagiotis Adamopoulos, assistant professor of information systems & operations management; Vilma Todri, assistant professor of information systems & operations management; and Anindya Ghose (NYU-Stern) take a close look at the role of hidden personality traits of online users and how they play into the effectiveness of product WOM on Twitter. The trio used big data, machine learning methods, and causal inference econometric techniques to study consumer purchases made through Twitter accounts. The research showed an increase in the likelihood of a purchase by 47.58% when there was exposure to WOM tweets from a sender who had similar personality traits to the recipient of the information. The trio found that introvert users were much more accepting of WOM versus extrovert users. They also noted agreeable, conscientious, and open social media users are more effective influencers. The combinations of personality traits of disseminators and recipients of WOM impacted the decision to buy a product, with the researchers noting that a “WOM message from an extrovert user to an introvert peer increases the likelihood of a subsequent purchase by 71.28%.”

 Consumer word-of-mouth and social media

emory-experts-why-companies-invest-in-local-social-media-influencers

Goizueta Term Chair Associate Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management

Associate Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management

Companies seek local influencers to pitch products. Even though most influencers amass geographically dispersed followings on social media, companies are willing to funnel billions of sponsorship dollars to multiple influencers located in different geographic areas, effectively creating sponsorships that span cities, countries, and in some cases even, the globe. The desire to work with local influencers has spawned advertising agencies that specialize in connecting companies with influencers and may soon redefine the influencer economy.

 This trend has merit, our research team finds. In a new Journal of Marketing study, we show a positive link between online influence and how geographically close an influencer’s followers are located. The nearer a follower is geographically to someone who posts an online recommendation, the more likely she is to follow that recommendation.

To investigate whether geographical distance still matters when word of mouth is disseminated online, our research team examined thousands of actual purchases made on Twitter. We found the likelihood that people who saw a Tweet mentioning someone they follow bought a product would subsequently also buy the product increases the closer they reside to the purchaser. Not only were followers significantly associated with a higher likelihood to heed an influencer’s recommendation the closer they physically resided to the influencer, the more quickly they were to do so, too.

We find that this role of geographic proximity in the effectiveness of online influence occurs across several known retailers and for different types of products, including video game consoles, electronics and sports equipment, gift cards, jewelry, and handbags. We show the results hold even when using different ways to statistically measure the effects, including state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning techniques on millions of Twitter messages.

 We posit that this role of geographic proximity may be due to an invisible connection between people that is rooted in the commonality of place. This invisible link can lead people to identify more closely with someone who is located nearby, even if they do not personally know that person. The result is that people are more likely to follow someone’s online recommendation when they live closer to them. These online recommendations can take any form, from a movie review to a restaurant rating to a product pitch.

What makes these findings surprising is that experts predicted the opposite effect when the internet first became widely adopted. Experts declared the death of distance. In theory, this makes sense: people don’t need to meet in person to share their opinions, reviews, and purchases when they can do so electronically. What the experts who envisioned the end of geography may have overlooked, however, is how people decide whose online opinion to trust. This is where cues that indicate a person’s identity, such as where that person lives in the real world, come into play.

We may be more likely to trust the online opinion from someone who lives in the same city as us than from someone who lives farther away, simply because we have location in common. Known as the social identity theory, this process explains how individuals form perceptions of belonging to and relating to a community. Who we identify with can affect the degree to which we are influenced, even when this influence occurs online. Our findings imply that technology and electronic communications do not completely overcome the forces that govern influence in the real world. Geographical proximity still matters, even in the digital space. The findings also suggest that information and cues about an individual’s identity online, such as where he/she lives, may affect his/her influence on others through the extent to which others feel they can relate to him/her.

These findings on how spatial proximity may still be a tie that binds even in an online world affirm what some companies have long suspected. Local influencers may have a leg up in the influence game and are worth their weight in location. For these reasons, companies may want to work with influencers who have more proximal connections to increase the persuasiveness of their online advertising, product recommendation, and referral programs. Government officials and not-for-profit organizations may similarly want to partner with local ambassadors to more effectively raise awareness of—and change attitudes and behaviors towards—important social issues.

 Goizueta faculty members Vilma Todri, assistant professor of Information Systems & Operations Management, Panagiotis (Panos) Adamopoulos, assistant professor of Information Systems & Operations Management, and Michelle Andrews, assistant professor of marketing, shared the following article with the American Marketing Association to highlight their new study published in the Journal of Marketing. 

To contact any of the experts for an interview regarding this topic, simply click on their icon to arrange a time to talk today.



Emory Experts - Why Companies Invest in Local Social Media Influencers

the-alexa-effect-how-the-internet-of-things-iot-is-increasing-retail-sales

Imagine this scenario. You’re out of coffee but with the click of a button or a simple voice command, you reorder a two months’ supply that will arrive the same day. And that almond milk you like? Well, imagine your fridge already knew you were running low on supplies and independently sent the order to restock before you ran out.

 The stuff of science-fiction until only recently, internet of things (IoT) technology is beginning to change the way we live and work. Simply put, IoT is a system of interrelated devices—things that can include gadgets, digital objects, or machines, wearables and so on—which have the capacity to send and receive data over a network without human agency or human interaction. As a technology, IoT is novel, and it’s poised to reconfigure a range of sectors and industries—among them, the world of retail.

Amazon is a leader in the consumer-facing space with an ecosystem of apps like Alexa, Fire TV, and the now-defunct Dash Button. Meanwhile, tech-savvy retailers are using IoT to facilitate operations. Smart shelves in stores can detect the status of perishable goods or inventory requirements; radio frequency identification (RFID) sensors can actively track the progress of produce through the supply chain. Retailers can even use IoT to send customers personalized digital coupons when they walk into the store.

As IoT continues to gain traction around the globe, the potential for efficiency-boosting innovation in retail is clear. Less clear, however, is its actual impact on consumer choices and behaviors. Sure, IoT can save time and mental effort, but how does that translate into real-world business outcomes?

This is the question that underscores new research by Vilma Todri and Panagiotis Adamopoulos, both assistant professors of information systems and operations management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School.

They were keen to understand whether consumer behavior is significantly changed under the regime of this new technology as it continues its roll out across the world. Specifically, they wanted to know if IoT technology actually increases demand for products.

And it turns out that it does.

“IoT technology in retail is really in its infancy, so understanding its impact on users and business is key,” Adamopoulos said. “We wanted to shed light on these dynamics at this early point to spark interest and generate more debate around how retailers can leverage this technology.”  Together with Stern’s Anindya Ghose, he and Todri put together a large data-set with information about sales of certain products in countries with existing IoT retail markets and in others where the technology has not yet been introduced.

“We needed to take into account these sorts of variables to really understand the effect,” Todri said. “So, we had our control group of non-IoT retail markets, and we were able to compare sales data for the same products in countries where the technology has been adopted.”  The researchers also controlled for time trends, looking at the impact on sale prior to and post IoT adoption.

“Looking at the data over time and pinpointing the exact moment when a product has been made available for sale via IoT sales channels across different countries and at different moments, we were able to infer the effect of the technology on product sales,” Todri said.

In total, they looked at sales for the same or similar products in six countries between 2015 and 2017. They also compared sales across different retailers.

“By analyzing the same sales information for different products in different markets using different channels across the world, we can see differences in the data that can only be attributable to this new technological feature,” Adamopoulos said. And the differences are significant.

The concept is fascinating, and if you are interested in learning more, a complete article about this topic is attached:

 If you are a journalist or looking to learn more about IoT, our experts can help.

Vilma Todri and Panagiotis Adamopoulos, both assistant professors of information systems and operations management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. Both experts are available to speak with media; simply click on either expert's icon to arrange an interview today.







The Alexa Effect: How the internet of things (IoT) is increasing retail sales

-consumer-wordofmouth-and-social-media

Certainly, marketers are well aware of the value of the consumers’ word-of-mouth (WOM) endorsements of a product or service. But the ubiquitous nature of social media demands that advertisers find new ways to tap into how consumers interact and communicate to leverage the power of WOM online. Panagiotis Adamopoulos, assistant professor of information systems & operations management; Vilma Todri, assistant professor of information systems & operations management; and Anindya Ghose (NYU-Stern) take a close look at the role of hidden personality traits of online users and how they play into the effectiveness of product WOM on Twitter. The trio used big data, machine learning methods, and causal inference econometric techniques to study consumer purchases made through Twitter accounts. The research showed an increase in the likelihood of a purchase by 47.58% when there was exposure to WOM tweets from a sender who had similar personality traits to the recipient of the information. The trio found that introvert users were much more accepting of WOM versus extrovert users. They also noted agreeable, conscientious, and open social media users are more effective influencers. The combinations of personality traits of disseminators and recipients of WOM impacted the decision to buy a product, with the researchers noting that a “WOM message from an extrovert user to an introvert peer increases the likelihood of a subsequent purchase by 71.28%.”

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