Title: Look inside. Predicting stock prices by analysing an enterprise intranet social network and using word co-occurrence networks

Authors: Andrea Fronzetti Colladon; Giacomo Scettri

Addresses: Department of Enterprise Engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Via del Politecnico, 1, 00133 Rome, Italy ' Department of Enterprise Engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Via del Politecnico, 1, 00133 Rome, Italy

Abstract: This study looks into employees' communication, offering novel metrics which can help to predict a company's stock price. We studied the intranet forum of a large Italian company, exploring the interactions and the use of language of about 8,000 employees. We built a network linking words included in the general discourse. In this network, we focused on the position of the node representing the company brand. We found that a lower sentiment, a higher betweenness centrality of the company brand, a denser word co-occurrence network and more equally distributed centrality scores of employees (lower group betweenness centrality) are all significant predictors of higher stock prices. Our findings offers new metrics that can be helpful for scholars, company managers and professional investors and could be integrated into existing forecasting models to improve their accuracy. Lastly, we contribute to the research on word co-occurrence networks by extending their field of application.

Keywords: stock price; economic forecasting; intranet; social network; web forum; semantic analysis; word co-occurrence network; online forum.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESB.2019.098986

International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 2019 Vol.36 No.4, pp.378 - 391

Received: 31 Mar 2017
Accepted: 26 Jun 2017
Published online: 12 Apr 2019 *

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