Georgios Zervas*

(*) I go by Giorgos which is pronounced Yor-gos

Georgios Zervas I am an Associate Professor of Marketing at Boston University Questrom School of Business and a founding member of the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences.

Here is my CV. You can also find me on SSRN and Google Scholar.

Previously, I was a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University working with Joan Feigenbaum, and an Affiliate at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) at Harvard University. I completed my PhD in 2011 in Computer Science at Boston University under the supervision of John Byers and Michael Mitzenmacher (from Harvard). I work on problems at the intersection of marketing, computer science, and economics, and a lot of my work has focused on large scale empirical studies of internet markets.

Contact: To contact me the old-fashioned way prepend the suffix of the URL above to @bu.edu, or, you can follow me on Twitter.

Publications

Journals
  1. Interacting User Generated Content Technologies: How Questions and Answers Affect Consumer Reviews [PDF] [SSRN][Journal]
    Shrabastee Banerjee, Chris Dellarocas, and Georgios Zervas
    Journal of Marketing Research (2021)
  2. A First Look at Online Reputation on Airbnb, Where Every Stay is Above Average [PDF] [SSRN][Journal]
    Georgios Zervas, Davide Proserpio, and John W. Byers
    Marketing Letters (2020)
    Media: The New York Times (Jan. 2015)
  3. Marketing in the Sharing Economy [Journal]
    Giana Eckhardt, Mark Houston, Baojun Jiang, Cait Lamberton, Aric Rindfleisch, and Georgios Zervas
    Journal of Marketing (2019)
  4. You Get What You Give: Theory and Evidence of Reciprocity in the Sharing Economy [PDF] [SSRN]
    Davide Proserpio, Wendy Xu, Georgios Zervas
    Quantitative Marketing and Economics (2018)
    Media: PC Magazine (Mar. 2018).
  5. The Rise of the Sharing Economy: Estimating the Impact of Airbnb on the Hotel Industry [PDF] [SSRN] [Journal]
    Georgios Zervas, Davide Proserpio, and John W. Byers
    Journal of Marketing Research (2017)
    Finalist for the 2018 Paul E. Green Award
    Media: Le nouvel Observateur (Aug. 2014), The Economist (Apr. 2014), New York Times Bits Blog (Feb. 2014), The Atlantic Cities (Feb. 2014).
  6. Online reputation management: Estimating the impact of management responses on consumer reviews [PDF] [SSRN] [Journal]
    Davide Proserpio and Georgios Zervas
    Marketing Science (2017)
    Finalist for the 2018 John D. C. Little Award
    Media: The Boston Globe (Apr. 2018).
  7. Fake it Till You Make it: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud [PDF] [SSRN] [Journal]
    Michael Luca and Georgios Zervas
    Management Science (2016)
    Media: HBR Blog (Aug. 2013), The Harvard Crimson (Sep. 2013), Marketwatch (Sept. 2013), BBC News (Sep. 2013), Yelp Blog (Sep. 2013) BBC News (Feb. 2014), Forbes (May 2014), FOX Business (Sep. 2014), Bloomberg View (Sep. 2014) Wall Street Journal (May 2019)
Conference proceedings
Peer-Reviewed Abstracts
  1. Learning Product Characteristics and Consumer Preferences from Search Data [Working paper]
    Luis Armona, Greg Lewis, and Georgios Zervas
    Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
  2. The Supply and Demand Effects of Review Platforms [Publisher]
    Greg Lewis and Georgios Zervas
    Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
  3. Interacting User Generated Content Technologies: How Q&As Affect Ratings & Reviews [Publisher]
    Shrabastee Banerjee, Chris Dellarocas, and Georgios Zervas
    Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
  4. The Impact of the Sharing Economy on the Hotel Industry: Evidence from Airbnb's Entry Into the Texas Market [Publisher]
    Georgios Zervas, Davide Proserpio, and John W. Byers
    Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
  5. Online Reputation Management: Estimating the Impact of Management Responses on Consumer Reviews [Publisher]
    Davide Proserpio and Georgios Zervas
    Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
Full Papers
  1. Understanding Emerging Threats to Online Advertising [PDF] [SSRN]
    Ceren Budak, Sharad Goel, Justin M. Rao, and Georgios Zervas
    Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
  2. The Groupon Effect on Yelp Ratings: A Root Cause Analysis [PDF]
    John Byers, Michael Mitzenmacher, Georgios Zervas
    Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
    Media: NPR (Jul. 2012), Huffington Post (Apr. 2012), Freakonomics blog (Mar. 2013), Hacker News.
  3. Daily Deals: Prediction, Social Diffusion, and Reputational Ramiļ¬cations [arXiv] [Dataset]
    John Byers, Michael Mitzenmacher, Georgios Zervas
    In Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) 2012
    Media: The New York Times (Nov. 2011), Time magazine (2011), BU Today (Nov. 2011), The CS Monitor (Oct. 2011), WBUR 90.9 (Oct. 2011), the MIT Technology Review (Sep. 2011), The Atlantic (Sep. 2011), The Wall St. Journal (Sep. 2011). Bloomberg TV (2011).
    A little help for Yelp: During our work we discovered, and helped Yelp fix a privacy leak. See the blog post by Yelp's engineering team which explains in detail what happened.
  4. Information Asymmetries in Pay-Per-Bid Auctions: How Swoopo Makes Bank
    John Byers, Michael Mitzenmacher, Georgios Zervas
    Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
    [PDF (Shorter EC version)] [PDF (Extended arXiv version)] [Dataset]
  5. Adaptive Weighing Designs for Keyword Value Computation [PDF]
    John Byers, Michael Mitzenmacher, Georgios Zervas
    In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) 2010

Working papers

Please email me for recent copies of some the papers below.

  1. Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Differentiated Products Demand Systems [PDF]
    Greg Lewis, Bora Ozaltun, and Georgios Zervas
  2. Learning Product Characteristics and Consumer Preferences from Search Data [PDF]
    Luis Armona, Greg Lewis, and Georgios Zervas
  3. The Supply and Demand Effects of Review Platforms [PDF]
    Greg Lewis and Georgios Zervas
  4. The Welfare Impact of Consumer Reviews: A Case Study of the Hotel Industry
    Greg Lewis and Georgios Zervas
  5. Reviews and Regulation: Evidence from NY Restaurants
    Chiara Farronato and Georgios Zervas
  6. Causal Inference in Word-of-Mouth Research: Methods and Results [PDF]
    Stephan Seiler, Song Yao, Georgios Zervas
Unpublished notes
  1. The Evolving Quality of Groupon Deals [PDF]
    Georgios Zervas

Professional activities