PAUL DWYER
Assistant Professor of Marketing
B.S.C.E., University of South Florida
M.B.A., Texas A&M University
Ph.D., Texas A&M University

EML:  pdwyer@willamette.edu

"The ideas surrounding collective intelligence are the kind of ideas that cause convention to be questioned."

There are two things about Willamette that impressed me: the motto, “not unto ourselves alone are we born,” and the faculty’s intellectual diversity. I think that to be truly happy one must personally thrive while at the same time support the thriving of others, a true resilient and sustainable ecosystem. I think that my own thoughts are sufficiently different from the students and faculty that I can offer a new perspective, and that the reverse is also true: they can lead me to think in ways I would not have thought on my own. So by sharing intellectually we better ourselves by being together and in so doing offer something to the world it would not have had without us.

Professor Dwyer began his professional career as a software engineer in the heyday of internet startups, which he describes as "rags to riches and back to rags again." For Professor Dwyer it was a journey that taught him three lessons: "much of life is inexplicable, the only constant is change, and survival demands a sense of humor."

His passion is observing human behavior and trying to explain it. On the personal side, he gets a lot of joy from running, reading and travel.

My primary research interest is collective intelligence, the capacity of groups to be smarter than lone genius. This is the principle at the heart of all markets and yet most management is top-down, one controlling many. My aim in the classroom is to introduce ideas that get students to question common practice and then act in a thoughtful, rather than a robotic way. They will then be architects of events, rather than pawns of convention or victims of circumstance. I think the ideas surrounding collective intelligence are the kind of ideas that cause convention to be questioned.

"Measuring Interpersonal Influence in Online Conversations," Marketing Science Institute, Working Paper Series, Forthcoming 2009
Marketing Science, invited revise and resubmit.

Even though many models of information diffusion have been proposed there is still much debate over which is correct, and a lack of empirical evidence to resolve these debates. This uncertainty has been attributed to a paucity of interpersonal influence metrics. This paper proposes theme resonance, a hybrid metric derived from two existing textual content analysis systems: Centering Resonance Analysis (CRA) and General Inquirer. Theme resonance is demonstrated with text from online conversations in a weblog, allowing the propagation of new conversational themes to be traced from initiator though all subsequent propagators. Theme resonance identified a large class of moderately influential participant responsible for viral propagation of themes. Blog authors are shown to have a strong advantage in initiating viral themes. However that advantage is not absolute, as a class of influential commenter was identified who can start conversations in unanticipated directions.

"Measuring the Value of Electronic Word-of-Mouth and its Impact in Consumer Communities," Journal of Interactive Marketing, 21 (2), 63-79, Spring 2007

Marketing practitioners have recognized a need to measure customer-generated media in addition to the traditional marketing metrics. Message boards, chat rooms, blogs, and virtual brand communities have become important venues for customergenerated media. These communities can be modeled as two distinct, albeit connected, networks: social and informational. These networks change over time under the influence of online word of mouth. This study introduces an adaptation of PageRank as a new metric for measuring the value a community assigns each word-of-mouth instance and the value the community assigns to the members that create them. That metric is used to empirically support a model explaining how highly valued information builds the social network. These communities are egalitarian in assigning value to informational content, without regard to the status of its source, and highly valued content explains 10% of social network growth.