Journal of Competitiveness | 2026
Authors: Pham T.P.; Trang L.N.T.
DOI: 10.7441/joc.2026.01.01
Journal: Journal of Competitiveness
Year: 2026
Publisher: Tomas Bata University in Zlín
Document Type: Article
Open Access: All Open Access; Gold Open Access
Cited by: 0
This paper examines the relationship between information search and product experience ratings in a case study of the Vietcombank mobile banking app. The Python programming language was used to scrape the Vietcombank mobile banking app ratings from Google Play, and the search volume for the terms “Vietcombank” and “VCB” was extracted from Google Trends. Data analysis was conducted using the VAR-Granger, ordinary least squares, and copula approaches, based on data collected from December 2012 to April 2023. The estimation results provide empirical evidence supporting the relationship between information search and product experience ratings. Specifically, the findings indicate the following: (1) a unidirectional causality relationship from the quantity of searches for “Vietcombank” to the app ratings; (2) a bidirectional causality relationship between searches for the term “VCB” and app ratings; (3) a positive influence of search volume on app ratings; (4) an upper tail dependency between the search volume of the term “Vietcombank” and the app ratings; and (5) no tail structural dependence structure between the search volume of the term “VCB” and the app ratings. © 2026, Tomas Bata University in Zlín. All rights reserved.
App ratings; Copula; Google search; VAR-Granger; Vietcombank