Christoph G. Schuetz, opens an external URL in a new window, assistant professor at the Institute of Business Informatics – Data & Knowledge Engineering (WIN-DKE), published an article together with Lan Wang from the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics and Dahai Cai from Sichuan University in the journal Information & Management with the title “Choosing Response Strategies in Social Media Crisis Communication: An Evolutionary Game Theory Perspective”. The journal Information & Management is one of the high-impact journals in the field of Information Systems and Business Informatics, with an impact factor of 5.155 in 2019.

Lan Wang was a visiting PhD student at WIN-DKE in 2018/19, who under the direction of Dr. Schuetz investigated the enterprise’s optimal choice of strategy in a social media crisis (“shitstorm”) in response to the behavior of social media users. The presented research applies evolutionary game theory to model the behavior of social media users and the enterprise in different situations, leading to different outcomes. The paper looks at different case studies, using social media analytics and other informative sources to determine model parameters. For example, in 2018, when Starbucks faced a crisis of racial bias in one of its US stores, the company reacted in a positive way, closing the entirety of its US stores for a day in order to have employees attend racial-bias education. Starbucks was thus able to quell the outrage of users on social media.

Read the article: Choosing Response Strategies in Social Media Crisis Communication: An Evolutionary Game Theory Perspective, opens an external URL in a new window