Influencer
Obligatory Publicity Increases Charitable Acts
Adelle Yang & Christopher Hsee
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
To entice new donors and spread awareness of the charitable cause, many charity campaigns encourage donors to broadcast their charitable acts with self-promotion devices such as donor pins, logoed apparel, and social media hashtags. However, this voluntary publicity strategy may not be particularly attractive because potential donors may worry that observers will attribute their publicized charitable behavior to “impure” image motives rather than “pure” altruistic motives. We propose and test a counterintuitive campaign strategy -- obligatory publicity, which requires prospective donors to use a self-promotion device as a prerequisite for contributing to the campaign. Five studies (N = 10,866) test the application and effectiveness of the proposed strategy. The first three studies, including two field experiments, find that obligatory-publicity campaigns recruit more contributions and campaign promoters than voluntary-publicity campaigns. The last two studies demonstrate that the obligatory-publicity strategy produces a greater effect among people with stronger image motives and that the effect is mitigated when the publicized charitable act signals a low level of altruism. Finally, we discuss limitations and implications of this research.
Biased Sampling of Early Users and the Direction of Startup Innovation
Ruiqing Cao, Rembrand Koning & Ramana Nanda
NBER Working Paper, June 2021
Abstract:
Using data from a prominent online platform for launching new digital products, we document that the composition of the platform's ‘beta testers’ on the day a new product is launched has a systematic and persistent impact on the venture's success. Specifically, we use word embedding methods to classify products on this platform as more or less focused on the needs of female customers. We then show that female-focused products launched on a typical day – when nine in ten users on the platform are men – experience 45% less growth in the year after launch. By isolating exogenous variation in the composition of beta testers unrelated to the characteristics of launched products on that day, we find that on days when there are unexpectedly more women, this gender-product gap shrinks towards zero. Further, consistent with a sampling bias mechanism, we find that the composition of beta testers appears to impact VC decision making and the entrepreneur's subsequent product development efforts. Overall, our findings suggest that the composition of early users can induce systematic biases in the signals of startup potential, with consequential effects – including a shortage of innovations aimed at consumers who are underrepresented among early users.
Social Learning in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Community Establishments’ Closure Decisions Follow Those of Nearby Chain Establishments
Mathijs de Vaan et al.
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
As conveners that bring various stakeholders into the same physical space, firms can powerfully influence the course of pandemics such as coronavirus disease 2019. Even when operating under government orders and health guidelines, firms have considerable discretion to keep their establishments open or closed during a pandemic. We examine the role of social learning in the exercise of this discretion at the establishment level. In particular, we evaluate how the closure decisions of chain establishments, which are associated with national brands, affect those of proximate, same-industry community establishments, which are independently owned or managed. We conduct these analyses using cell phone location tracking data on daily visits to 230,403 U.S.-based community establishments that are colocated with chain establishments affiliated with 319 national brands. We disentangle the effects of social learning from confounding factors by using an instrumental variables strategy that relies on local variation in community establishments’ exposure to closure decisions made by brands at the national level. Our results suggest that closing decisions of community establishments are affected by the decisions made by chain establishments; a community establishment is 3.5% more likely to be open on a given day if the proportion of nearby open chain establishments increases by one standard deviation.
I like what you like: Social norms and media enjoyment
Kevin Kryston & Allison Eden
Mass Communication and Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
People consume and enjoy similar media entertainment as their friends and close others do. Yet the underlying psychological processes driving selection and consumption of entertainment considered “mainstream” within a group are still unclear. Given that individuals’ behaviors and attitudes are influenced by the perceived prevalence of others’ behaviors (descriptive norms) and perceptions of what others approve (injunctive norms), we examined the role of descriptive and injunctive norms in media selection and enjoyment. In an online experiment, we tested whether norm messages affected perceptions of group norms, and whether these perceptions influenced the enjoyment of a movie trailer and intention to watch the full film. We also tested the moderating roles of group identity and proximity on perceived norms and subsequent effects. Results showed that norm messages predicted perceived descriptive norms, which in turn predicted enjoyment of the trailer and intention to watch the film. Norm messages also predicted perceived injunctive norms, and the effect of injunctive norms on outcome variables was strengthened by group proximity and identity. The discussion highlights ways that social norms can inform understandings of socially-influenced media enjoyment and selection in future work and unique opportunities to study normative influence in a media setting.
The Signal Value of Crowdfunded Products
Oguz Acar et al.
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Crowdfunding has emerged as an alternative means of financing new ventures by utilizing the financial support of a large group of individual investors. This research asks a novel question: Does being crowdfunded carry any signal value for the broader market of observing consumers? Seven studies reveal a consumer preference for crowdfunded products, even after controlling for a product’s objective product characteristics. The authors identify two inferences that help explain this effect: (1) consumers perceive crowdfunded products to be of higher quality, and (2) they believe that supporting crowdfunding reduces inequality in the marketplace. The authors further document an important boundary condition of the first inference: the identified effect reverses in high-risk domains (e.g., products that involve high physical risk) due to consumer perceptions that the crowdfunding model lacks sufficient professionalism to mitigate risk. With regard to the second inference, the authors find that the positive crowdfunding effect is particularly strong among consumers who value social equality. Taken together, this work sheds new light on consumer perceptions of crowdfunding, elucidates why and when consumers prefer crowdfunded products, and offers actionable implications for managers.
How Do Peer Awards Motivate Creative Content? Experimental Evidence from Reddit
Gordon Burtch et al.
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We theorize peer awards’ effects on the volume and novelty of creative user-generated content (UGC) produced at online platform communities. We then test our hypotheses via a randomized field experiment on Reddit, wherein we randomly and anonymously assigned Reddit’s Gold Award to 905 users’ posts over a two-month period. We find that peer awards induced recipients to make longer, more frequent posts and that these effects were particularly pronounced among newer community members. Further, we show that recipients were causally influenced to engage in greater (lesser) exploitation (exploration) behavior, producing content that exhibited significantly greater textual similarity to their own past (awarded) content. However, because the effects were most pronounced among new community members, who also produce content that, in general, is systematically more novel than that of established members to begin with, this process yields a desirable outcome: larger volumes of generally novel UGC for the community.
Choosing the Light Meal: Real-time Aggregation of Calorie Information Reduces Meal Calories
Eric VanEpps et al.
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Numeric labeling of calories on restaurant menus has been implemented widely, but scientific studies have generally not found substantial effects on calories ordered. The present research tests the impact of a feedback format that is more targeted at how consumers select and revise their meals: real-time aggregation of calorie content to provide dynamic feedback about meal calories via a traffic light label. Because these labels intuitively signal when a meal shifts from healthy to unhealthy (via the change from green to a yellow or red light), they prompt decision makers to course correct in real time, before they finalize their choice. Results from five pre-registered experiments (N = 11,900) show that providing real-time traffic light feedback about the total caloric content of a meal reduces calories in orders, even compared to similar aggregated feedback in numeric format. Patterns of ordering reveal this effect to be driven by people revising high-calorie orders more frequently, leading them to choose fewer and lower-calorie items. Consumers also like traffic light aggregation, indicating greater satisfaction with their order and greater intentions to return to restaurants that use them. The authors discuss how dynamic feedback using intuitive signals could yield benefits in contexts beyond food choice.