Interactions and Sentiment in Personal Finance Forums: An Exploratory Analysis
<p>Rank–Size plot. (<b>a</b>) Wealth Redistribution dataset; (<b>b</b>) Budget-Minded dataset; (<b>c</b>) Healthcare dataset; (<b>d</b>) Life Insurance dataset; (<b>e</b>) First Real Job dataset.</p> "> Figure 2
<p>Social network for the Healthcare thread.</p> "> Figure 3
<p>Mean sentiment scores. (<b>a</b>) Wealth Redistribution dataset; (<b>b</b>) Budget-Minded dataset; (<b>c</b>) Healthcare dataset; (<b>d</b>) Life Insurance dataset; (<b>e</b>) First Real Job dataset.</p> "> Figure 4
<p>Mean sentiment scores for the five threads.</p> ">
Abstract
:1. Introduction
- Is participation in online personal finance forums uniform?
- Do some participants take a lead and possibly exert a higher influence on others?
- Are major participants inclusive? Or are other participants put off by their dominance?
- What sentiments are exhibited on posts?
- We propose some measures of dominance phenomena, borrowing them from the field of industrial economics.
- We find that dominance phenomena are present, which answers RQ1 negatively: the participation is quite far from being uniform, with a small fraction of posters submitting most papers, and the most frequent poster contributing even more than a third of the total number of posts, allowing us to answer positively to RQ2 (see Section 3).
- We find that direct interaction (in the form of a reply to the latest post) involves a small minority of posters, which adds to the negative answer to RQ1 (Section 4).
- We find that self-replies, consisting in a poster submitting a sequence of posts and therefore unduly reducing the possibilities for others to interact, make up a significant portion of the thread, which allows us to answer RQ3 (Section 4).
- We find that rejoinders, which may represent aggressive behaviour, are themselves a significant portion of the overall number of posts, providing us with further support to answer RQ3 (Section 4).
- We find that trust is the most present emotion in the language of the posts, but anticipation and anger are strongly present as well, allowing us to answer RQ4 (Section 5).
2. Datasets
- Should US wealth be redistributed?, whose aim is to examine if redistributing the wealth of the richest people in the US to the poorest people would make any difference at all [14].
- The problem with being budget minded is other people, which examines the strain on the relations within a family, in the work environment, or with friends, when you are budget-minded and they are not [15].
- Health Care and the alternative point of view, where a lot of topics are discussed concerning the adoption of health insurance [16].
- Indexed Universal Life Insurance, where the value of life insurance policies is debated [17].
- First Real Job...No Idea How to Save, where advice is given and sought regarding saving money and plan one’s financial future at the beginning of one’s working life [18].
3. Dominance in a Thread
4. Interaction Dynamics
- the nodes of the network represent the posters;
- an edge is drawn between node i and node j if poster i replies to a post submitted by poster j (i.e., poster i comes immediately after poster j in the sequence of posts);
- the weight of the edge between node i and node j is the number of times poster i replies to a post submitted by poster j.
5. Sentiment Analysis
6. Discussion
6.1. Theoretical Contributions
6.2. Implications for Practice
7. Conclusions
Funding
Conflicts of Interest
Abbreviations
HHI | Hirschman–Herfindahl Index |
Concentration ratio |
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Thread | No. of Posts | No. of Posters | Avg No. of Posts |
---|---|---|---|
Wealth Redistribution | 248 | 31 | 8.00 |
Budget-Minded | 259 | 64 | 4.05 |
Healthcare | 217 | 22 | 9.86 |
Life Insurance | 192 | 19 | 10.11 |
First Real Job | 190 | 24 | 7.92 |
Thread | Zipf Exponent | HHI | |
---|---|---|---|
Wealth Redistribution | 1.336 | 0.1277 | 60.08% |
Budget-Minded | 0.981 | 0.0592 | 37.07% |
Healthcare | 1.490 | 0.1556 | 68.20% |
Life Insurance | 1.504 | 0.1446 | 70.31% |
First Real Job | 1.444 | 0.2008 | 71.58% |
Thread | Most Frequent Poster |
---|---|
Wealth Redistribution | 27.82% |
Budget-Minded | 18.92% |
Healthcare | 29.95% |
Life Insurance | 20.83% |
First Real Job | 36.84% |
Thread | Sparsity [%] |
---|---|
Wealth Redistribution | 89.49 |
Budget-Minded | 95.31 |
Healthcare | 83.68 |
Life Insurance | 81.16 |
First Real Job | 87.84 |
Thread | No. of Self-Replies | No. of Rejoinders |
---|---|---|
Wealth Redistribution | 38 (15.3%) | 64 (25.8%) |
Budget-Minded | 11 (4.2%) | 35 (13.5%) |
Healthcare | 32 (14.7%) | 55 (25.3%) |
Life Insurance | 39 (20.3%) | 41 (21.4%) |
First Real Job | 23 (12.1%) | 51 (26.8%) |
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Naldi, M. Interactions and Sentiment in Personal Finance Forums: An Exploratory Analysis. Information 2019, 10, 237. https://doi.org/10.3390/info10070237
Naldi M. Interactions and Sentiment in Personal Finance Forums: An Exploratory Analysis. Information. 2019; 10(7):237. https://doi.org/10.3390/info10070237
Chicago/Turabian StyleNaldi, Maurizio. 2019. "Interactions and Sentiment in Personal Finance Forums: An Exploratory Analysis" Information 10, no. 7: 237. https://doi.org/10.3390/info10070237