regard. Instead of surveying consumers, one can observe how they express themselves on the internet, via searches, chat rooms, social network sites, blogs, product reviews and the like. Some preliminary evidence suggests that “internet derived consumer opinions” are predictive of subsequent behavior (e.g. Shin, Hanssens, Kim and Gajula 2011). Future research should examine which internet-derived attitudinal metrics are the most relevant and investigate the extent to which measurement error in online versus offline metrics may matter. These metrics could then be substituted for the survey based measures that were used in this pape