Going Down with the Sinking Ship Smiling: Sentiment Analysis of overconfidence in a Web Forum of a Financial Institution

Research on decision making has focused on real-world organizations and environments. Virtual environments, however, are increasingly prominent. Within virtual environments, web-forums are both a common means to gather information and a tool to make decisions. This research analyzes the pattern of decision making behavior as expressed through an analysis of sentiments. One specific aspect of human behavior, overconfidence in decision making, is assessed by analyzing 20,000 topics extracted from a web forum of a financial institution on the Google Finance discussion board. The results of the study reveal that, when a financial institution market goes down, the members of a virtual environment pay more attention to web forum information. In addition, the analysis suggests that overconfidence can be a crucial decision making factor in a virtual environment.