Do Body Expressions Leave Good Impressions? - Predicting Investment Decisions based on Pitcher's Body Expressions

Merel M. Jung, Mark Van Vlierden, Werner Liebregts, Itır Önal Ertuğrul

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionScientificpeer-review

Abstract

This work aims to investigate whether displayed body expressions during venture pitches hold predictive value over the success of gathering funding. To this end the performance of several traditional regression models trained on aggregated body expression features is compared to that of deep recurrent models. Moreover, the impact of features and the effect of oversampling to counteract data imbalance are investigated. The results showed that temporal modeling of body expressions with GRU yielded the best performance (average MAE = 16.9). Oversampling was found to not improve models’ performance. The analysis of the impact of features suggest that higher levels of expressed body movements negatively affect investment scores whereas a more open body posture can have a positive effect. These findings show that body expressions can be predictive of investment decisions. Future work will be directed towards integrating these cues into a multimodal model to aid entrepreneurs in improving their pitching skills and further the understanding of the investment decision-making process.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICMI '23 Companion: Companion Publication of the 25th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction
PublisherACM
Pages36–40
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9798400703218
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 9 Oct 2023

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Keywords

  • body expressions
  • entrepreneurial pitch competition
  • investment decision-making
  • nonverbal behavior
  • social signal processing

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