Abstract
Companies deal with good and bad publicity daily. We study the impact of news on consumer sentiment toward a company in the presence of pre-news sentiment. We use Sina Weibo's (the Chinese version of Twitter) microblogging data and the full list of news items published in Sina Finance between 2013 and 2014 to measure sentiment. In our study, we address the following research questions: Does negative news have a greater impact than positive news on consumer sentiment change? Does news affect sentiment change to a greater degree when pre-news sentiment matches the news valence? Does the type of company (either B2C or B2B) matter? Our empirical findings show that consumers overreact to negative news and negative pre-news sentiment intensifies such overreaction, leading to negative herding. Further, negative pre-news sentiment is even more damaging for B2B companies than for B2C companies.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 364-376 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Journal of Business Research |
| Volume | 142 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2022 Mar |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors are indebted to Yuanping WANG, Xikun SUN, Lu LIU and Sina Corporation, who provided the data, and Xuezhi CHAI and Shoufu LUO, who helped us program. This work was supported by the Yonsei University Research Grant of 2021.
Funding Information:
The authors are indebted to Yuanping WANG, Xikun SUN, Lu LIU and Sina Corporation, who provided the data, and Xuezhi CHAI and Shoufu LUO, who helped us program. This work was supported by the Yonsei University Research Grant of 2021.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier Inc.
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Marketing