The use of big data and its effects in a diffusion forecasting model for Korean reverse mortgage subscribers

In recent years, big data has been widely used to understand consumers' behavior and opinions. With this paper, we consider the use of big data and its effects in the problem of projecting the number of reverse mortgage subscribers in Korea. We analyzed web-news, blog post, and search traffic volumes associated with Korean reverse mortgages and integrated them into a Generalized Bass Model (GBM) as a part of the exogenous variables representing marketing effort. We particularly consider web-news volume as a proxy for marketer-generated content (MGC) and blog post and search traffic volumes as proxies for user-generated content (UGC). Empirical analysis provides some interesting findings: First, the GBM by incorporating big data is helpful for forecasting the sales of Korean reverse mortgages, and second, the UGC as an exogenous variable is more useful for predicting sales volume than the MGC. The UGC can explain consumers' interest relatively well. Additional sensitivity analysis supports that the UGC is important for increasing sales volume. Finally, prediction performance is different between blog posts and search traffic volumes.