Strengths

E-commerce/e-business

This includes investigating the impact of “guanxi” in Alibaba/Taobao, the impact of social media, interface design to improve web presence, trust and distrust in electronic commerce, online consumer reviews and impact on consumer behaviours, social media for collaboration, group buying through social networks, deception detection in social media such as Amazon, ePinions and Alibaba/Taobao, online seller performance in eMarketplaces such as Alibaba/Taobao and eBay, user behaviour in online social services such as social networking sites, and impact of sentiment social networks from product reviews on purchasing decisions. The range of research methods used includes qualitative, surveys, experiments, design science, social network analysis, web analytics, and econometric methods.

On-line marketing strategies

The college has strong interests and strengths in the areas of social media and business intelligence. Current research areas include online marketing strategy, value co-creation and crowdsourcing in social media, consumer online learning, and online brand communities. The expertise of marketing faculty supports these research areas. Several colleagues are experts in online marketing and social networks and some have worked with large scale data and empirical modeling of consumer choice.

Business intelligence

Centre members have a long history in conducting academic and applied research in business intelligence. The college set up a Knowledge Discovery Centre in 2001 which is an inter-disciplinary venture based on a strategic partnership between CityU and SAS Institute, a leading software supplier in e-intelligence. In the past ten years, colleagues have conducted numerous business intelligence projects for a wide spectrum of business and industrial corporations. Current Business Intelligence research includes: e-commerce, Market Research, Consumer Satisfaction, Econometrics, Public Health Management, Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Energy policy and Management, and Reliability Studies.