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

EML:  pdwyer@willamette.edu

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.

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.

My professional career began as a software engineer in the heyday of internet startups, rags to riches and back to rags again. It was a journey that taught me three lessons: much of life is inexplicable, the only constant is change, and survival demands a sense of humor.

My passion is observing human behavior and trying to explain it. I also get a lot of joy from running, reading and travel.

"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 adapted PageRank (APR), 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.

WORKING PAPERS:
"Building Active Blogs with Collective Cognition: its Prerequisites and Outcomes," with Rajan Varadarajan, under second review at the Journal of Marketing.

"Diversity of Thought in the Blogosphere," with Rajan Varadarajan, targeted to the Journal of Consumer Research.

"The Effect of Cognitive Diversity on Markets," targeted to the Journal of Economic Perspectives.