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Author: Kamer Toker Yildiz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 99
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Book Description
The wide adoption of the Internet and social media has changed how consumers communicate amongst themselves and how companies communicate with their customers. Therefore, investigating the role of social interactions is important in understanding how consumers influence each other through online as well as offline channels for both marketing researchers, and companies that wish to leverage social media more effectively. This dissertation consists of two essays focusing on social influence, network effects and their marketing implications in today's socially engaged world. The first essay focuses on peer influence and studies the differential impact of online and offline social interactions on consumer's repeat usage behavior, and the effectiveness of monetary incentives in the presence of these social interactions. For this purpose, we develop a modeling framework that parses out the impacts of these individual effects and investigates their relative impact on behavior using a unique data set from a wellness program. We find that the effect of online interactions does indeed vary significantly in the presence of offline interactions and that ignoring the latter may well bias the estimates of the former. Furthermore, our results show that monetary incentives relative to social interactions have a significant, though lesser impact on repeat usage behavior. We finally offer several strategic implications by exploring a variety of scenarios through simulation analysis based on the model estimates. The second essay introduces anonymous others ("non-peer") influence in addition to peer influence and compares the relative influence of these two sources on consumers' product evaluations in an experimental setting. We show that contrary to the existing intuition, peers are not always more influential than non-peers and that the influence of these two sources depends on the proportion of people who endorse the product (i.e. , endorsement status: majority/minority endorsement). Interestingly, we find that peers have more positive influence than non-peers only under minority (but not majority) endorsement (experiment 1). We further show that peer influence manifests under minority endorsement because of consumers' endorsement and product fit perceptions (experiment 2). However, this effect diminishes if the endorsement is framed negatively (experiment 3) and gets stronger when the numeric size of the source is large (experiment 4). We discuss these findings in light of prevailing source influence theories and offer suggestions for marketing actions and firm strategy. We believe that this dissertation contributes not only to the marketing literature but also to other disciplines including social psychology, economics and operations research while offering useful implications for companies leveraging social media for both internal and external purposes.
Author: Kamer Toker Yildiz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 99
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Book Description
The wide adoption of the Internet and social media has changed how consumers communicate amongst themselves and how companies communicate with their customers. Therefore, investigating the role of social interactions is important in understanding how consumers influence each other through online as well as offline channels for both marketing researchers, and companies that wish to leverage social media more effectively. This dissertation consists of two essays focusing on social influence, network effects and their marketing implications in today's socially engaged world. The first essay focuses on peer influence and studies the differential impact of online and offline social interactions on consumer's repeat usage behavior, and the effectiveness of monetary incentives in the presence of these social interactions. For this purpose, we develop a modeling framework that parses out the impacts of these individual effects and investigates their relative impact on behavior using a unique data set from a wellness program. We find that the effect of online interactions does indeed vary significantly in the presence of offline interactions and that ignoring the latter may well bias the estimates of the former. Furthermore, our results show that monetary incentives relative to social interactions have a significant, though lesser impact on repeat usage behavior. We finally offer several strategic implications by exploring a variety of scenarios through simulation analysis based on the model estimates. The second essay introduces anonymous others ("non-peer") influence in addition to peer influence and compares the relative influence of these two sources on consumers' product evaluations in an experimental setting. We show that contrary to the existing intuition, peers are not always more influential than non-peers and that the influence of these two sources depends on the proportion of people who endorse the product (i.e. , endorsement status: majority/minority endorsement). Interestingly, we find that peers have more positive influence than non-peers only under minority (but not majority) endorsement (experiment 1). We further show that peer influence manifests under minority endorsement because of consumers' endorsement and product fit perceptions (experiment 2). However, this effect diminishes if the endorsement is framed negatively (experiment 3) and gets stronger when the numeric size of the source is large (experiment 4). We discuss these findings in light of prevailing source influence theories and offer suggestions for marketing actions and firm strategy. We believe that this dissertation contributes not only to the marketing literature but also to other disciplines including social psychology, economics and operations research while offering useful implications for companies leveraging social media for both internal and external purposes.
Author: Qian Tang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Social networking and social media technologies have greatly changed the way information is created and transmitted. Social media has made content contribution an efficient approach for individual brand building. With abundant user generated content and social networks, content consumers are constantly subject to social influence. Such social influence can be further utilized to encourage pro-social behavior. Chapter 1 examines the incentives for content contribution in social media. We propose that exposure and reputation are the major incentives for contributors. Besides, as more and more social media websites offer advertising-revenue sharing with some of their contributors, shared revenue provides an extra incentive for contributors who have joined revenue-sharing programs. We develop a dynamic structural model to identify a contributor's underlying utility function from observed contribution behavior. We recognize the dynamic nature of the content-contribution decision--that contributors are forward-looking, anticipating how their decisions impact future rewards. Using data collected from YouTube, we show that content contribution is driven by a contributor's desire for exposure, revenue sharing, and reputation and that the contributor makes decisions dynamically. Chapter 2 examines how social influence impact individuals' content consumption decisions in social network. Specifically, we consider social learning and network effects as two important mechanisms of social influence, in the context of YouTube. Rather than combining both social learning and network effects under the umbrella of social contagion or peer influence, we develop a theoretical model and empirically identify social learning and network effects separately. Using a unique data set from YouTube, we find that both mechanisms have statistically and economically significant effects on video views, and which mechanism dominates depends on the specific video type. Chapter 3 studies incentive mechanism to improve users' pro-social behavior based on social comparison. In particular, we aim to motivate organizations to improve Internet security. We propose an approach to increase the incentives for addressing security problems through reputation concern and social comparison. Specifically, we process existing security vulnerability data, derive explicit relative security performance information, and disclose the information as feedback to organizations and the public. To test our approach, we conducted a field quasi-experiment for outgoing spam for 1,718 autonomous systems in eight countries. We found that the treatment group subject to information disclosure reduced outgoing spam approximately by 16%. Our results suggest that social information and social comparison can be effectively leveraged to encourage desirable behavior.
Author: Joseph P Davin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
In this dissertation, I study how consumers influence each other in the adoption and engagement of digital goods. In the first essay, I study peer influence in mobile game adoption. Although peer effects are expected to influence consumer decisions, they are difficult to identify in observational studies due selection bias: Friends share common characteristics and behave in similar ways even without peer effects. I use a novel approach to estimate unobserved characteristics which endogenously drive tie formation and use the estimates to control for selection, without need for instruments. This is the first paper to use latent space to reduce bias in peer influence estimates. I find that peers account for 27% of mobile game adoptions, and that ignoring latent homophily would bias the estimates by 40%, in line with previous studies. In some samples, ignoring latent homophily can result in overestimation of social effects by over 100%. In the second essay, I examine the effect of zero rating on consumer behavior in a social network. I use Facebook data on millions of users to quantify direct, peer, and long-term effects of zero rating, a campaign where consumers can access digital media over mobile networks for free, on social network activities. I find that zero rating does not have the same effect on all social network activities. While the direct impact of zero rating is positive on all activities, users with more friends on zero rating create less, consume more, and give more feedback on content. In addition, zero rating does not have a uniform effect across consumers. Some consumers benefit more from zero rating than others, and I show that network characteristics can help identify those consumers whose network benefits the most from zero rating.
Author: Mehmet Kaya
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030025926
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
This timely book focuses on influence and behavior analysis in the broader context of social network applications and social media. Twitter accounts of telecommunications companies are analyzed. Rumor sources in finite graphs with boundary effects by message-passing algorithms are identified. The coherent, state-of-the-art collection of chapters was initially selected based on solid reviews from the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks, Analysis, and Mining (ASONAM '17). Chapters were then improved and extended substantially, and the final versions were rigorously reviewed and revised to meet the series standards. Original chapters coming from outside of the meeting round out the coverage. The result will appeal to researchers and students working in social network and social media analysis.
Author: Daniel J. Howard
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9781848727717
Category : Consumer behavior
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This collection of innovative essays examines the effects of social influence on consumer behavior processes and outcomes. The research focus is on social and consumer theory in helping to understand the interface between these two domains, with chapters investigating this interface from multiple perspectives thus providing diverse theoretical contributions to the discussion. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Social Influence.
Author: Seung Hwan (Mark) Lee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
This dissertation contains three essays that investigate how a consumer's social network position (i.e., a person's location within a web of relationships) plays an important role in the way that consumer influences and exchanges information with others. Using social capital theory as the conceptual framework, I demonstrate that a consumer's location within a network (network centrality) has an effect on their ability to influence others and, conversely, on others' ability to influence them. I also show that network positions influence the type of information that is sought from others (information about the self or information about others). Moreover, I demonstrate that people's perceptions of their own social capital may not coincide with their actual stores of social capital, revealing how this discrepancy may yield certain social benefits and social costs. Together, the findings of this research contribute to our understanding of consumer networks and further emphasize the relevance and importance of social network positions and social capital. Essay 1 provides a framework for understanding the association between network centrality and the flow of consumer influence. Overall, people see themselves as opinion leaders when they perceive that they are central (i.e., popular) within their networks. However, these self-assessments are sometimes at odds with the perceptions of the rest of the network members. Counter-intuitively, the findings demonstrate that consumers who perceive themselves to be central in networks are quite susceptible to the influence of others. Essay 2 further extends the investigation of network centrality to information-seeking behavior. The results demonstrate that network centrality is positively related to a consumer's rate of seeking information from other network members. Interestingly, people occupying degree central positions tend to seek information about their own consumer behavior (i.e., feedback), while people occupying betweenness central positions tend to seek information about the behavior of other consumers. Finally, Essay 3 focuses on the instrumental and detrimental role of the individual's materialism in social network development. Based on an experimental study and a separate longitudinal field study of a social network, I demonstrate that materialistic consumers are susceptible to a perceptual network fallacy (a mismatch between individuals' perceptions of their social networks versus their actual social networks, as rated by others) over time. Results from the longitudinal field study demonstrate that materialistic individuals overestimated the number of friends they had in their social networks in two separate time periods. Further, materialistic individuals overestimated the growth of their social networks over time. A follow-up experimental study reveals that materialistic consumers overestimated the extent to which others desired to develop friendships with them. Using the latest social network analysis techniques, I demonstrate the unique advantages and disadvantages of occupying central positions in social networks.
Author: Gábor Darvasi
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3739227745
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 150
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Book Description
Social contagion is ubiquitous in the day-to-day lives of consumers. Whether at home with their families, at work with colleagues, spending leisure time with friends, or even when only surrounded by strangers, consumers are always exposed to and influenced by the actions of others. The wide-scale use of digital communication technologies and online social networks has further exacerbated this influence by enabling more varied and intense ways to connect and interact. In the three essays constituting this dissertation, we ask how marketers and product designers can purposefully use social product design features to achieve superior managerial outcomes by harnessing social contagion. The first essay delineates the state-of the-art research on social contagion by systematically mapping the moderators of social contagion. The first essay delineates the state-of the-art research on social contagion by systematically mapping the moderators of social contagion and identifies avenues for future research. In the second essay, we identify social contagion through geographic contiguity in the repeated use of a low-involvement digital service and show that it can be nearly completely crowded out by marketing communication. In the last essay, we demonstrate that product design features can be used to induce joint consumption which in turn leads to social contagion and ultimately an increased level of product use.
Author: Benson, Vladlena
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1466674024
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
Social technology is quickly becoming a vital tool in our personal, educational, and professional lives. However, while social networking helps the world stay connected, its use must be further examined in order to determine any possible pitfalls associated with the use of this technology. Implications of Social Media Use in Personal and Professional Settings investigates the paradoxical nature of social networking in our personal lives and in the workplace. Highlighting emergent research and psychological impacts, this publication is an indispensable reference source for academics, researchers, and professionals interested in the application of social media, as well as the positive aspects and detrimental effects of the usage of these technologies.
Author: Vijay Mahajan
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780792377511
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
Product sales, especially for new products, are influenced by many factors. These factors are both internal and external to the selling organization, and are both controllable and uncontrollable. Due to the enormous complexity of such factors, it is not surprising that product failure rates are relatively high. Indeed, new product failure rates have variously been reported as between 40 and 90 percent. Despite this multitude of factors, marketing researchers have not been deterred from developing and designing techniques to predict or explain the levels of new product sales over time. The proliferation of the internet, the necessity or developing a road map to plan the launch and exit times of various generations of a product, and the shortening of product life cycles are challenging firms to investigate market penetration, or innovation diffusion, models. These models not only provide information on new product sales over time but also provide insight on the speed with which a new product is being accepted by various buying groups, such as those identified as innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. New Product Diffusion Models aims to distill, synthesize, and integrate the best thinking that is currently available on the theory and practice of new product diffusion models. This state-of-the-art assessment includes contributions by individuals who have been at the forefront of developing and applying these models in industry. The book's twelve chapters are written by a combined total of thirty-two experts who together represent twenty-five different universities and other organizations in Australia, Europe, Hong Kong, Israel, and the United States. The book will be useful for researchers and students in marketing and technological forecasting, as well as those in other allied disciplines who study relevant aspects of innovation diffusion. Practitioners in high-tech and consumer durable industries should also gain new insights from New Product Diffusion Models. The book is divided into five parts: I. Overview; II. Strategic, Global, and Digital Environments for Diffusion Analysis; III. Diffusion Models; IV. Estimation and V. Applications and Software. The final section includes a PC-based software program developed by Gary L. Lilien and Arvind Rangaswamy (1998) to implement the Bass diffusion model. A case on high-definition television is included to illustrate the various features of the software. A free, 15-day trial access period for the updated software can be downloaded from http://www.mktgeng.com/diffusionbook. Among the book's many highlights are chapters addressing the implications posed by the internet, globalization, and production policies upon diffusion of new products and technologies in the population.
Author: Tong Bao
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Two significant phenomena emerge from recent internet development: consumers are influenced by social network; and consumers engage in consumption and production of user-generated content. This dissertation studies social influence and social media. In Chapter 1, we study how summer internship employer choices of MBA students at a major university are influenced by the choices made by their fellow students. We develop a simultaneous model of each individual's choice as a function of other students' choices. Our model of interdependence in decision making is structural and equilibrium-based. Also, the model is general enough to allow both positive and negative effects of average group choices on any individual's decision. The structure of our data enables us to identify endogenous social effects separately from exogenous or correlated effects. Specifically, in our data we see each student making choices about whether or not to apply for each job opening; exogenous and correlated effects do not vary in this sample and therefore endogenous effects are identified. We employ a two-stage procedure to address the endogeneity of choices: we estimate empirical choice probabilities in the first stage, and taste parameters for employer attributes and peer influence in the second stage. Our results show that as expected, students prefer jobs with strong employer attributes (e.g. high salary, large firm size). In addition, students are influenced by their peers' choices. However, in contrast to previous studies, we find negative (rather than positive) social effects. That is, strong attributes also make an internship employer less attractive, leading to a lower choice probability relative to cases of zero or positive social effects. This negative social effect is consistent with congestion, i.e. students are aware that a good internship will attract the interest of more students, thus lowering the odds of getting it. We find that these negative social effects are stronger for students with more work experience and stronger GMAT scores. While positive social effect leads to concentration of choices, negative social effect helps prevent concentration. In chapter 2, we analyze how large content-sharing websites operate for companies like Google and Yahoo. A content website provider needs to understand content users to achieve different objectives. Consumers searching content take sampling probability as given in deciding consumption, and producers are motivated by endorsement. Sampling probability is a key policy instrument. Endorsement may explain why a small number of producers generate most content. Individual behaviors alone cannot explain genesis and persistence of sampling probability and endorsement. Two distinguishing features of content-being free and non-rival preclude application of celebrated market equilibrium theory. We develop a content equilibrium from first principles. Consumer and producer can be compatible, and their interaction gives rise to endogenous sampling probability and endorsement. Inequality arises: higher quality producers always earn more endorsement and produce more content; and higher quality content is easier to find. Content system is optimal for consumer welfare despite inequality. Content system possesses a self-organization property to find equilibrium from other less desired states. We use this framework to show policy conflict may arise due to content firm's multiple identities.
