Essays on Social Networks and Consumer Behavior

Essays on Social Networks and Consumer Behavior PDF Author:
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Languages : de
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Essays on Social Networks and Consumer Behavior

Essays on Social Networks and Consumer Behavior PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : de
Pages :

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Essays on Social Influence, Network Effects and Use of Social Media in Impacting Consumer Behavior

Essays on Social Influence, Network Effects and Use of Social Media in Impacting Consumer Behavior PDF Author: Kamer Toker Yildiz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 99

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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.

The Structural Importance of Consumer Networks

The Structural Importance of Consumer Networks PDF Author: Seung Hwan (Mark) Lee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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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.

Essays on the Social Consumer

Essays on the Social Consumer PDF Author: Joseph P Davin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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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.

The Dark Side of Social Media

The Dark Side of Social Media PDF Author: Angeline Close Scheinbaum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351683802
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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The Dark Side of Social Media takes a consumer psychology perspective to online consumer behavior in the context of social media, focusing on concerns for consumers, organizations, and brands. Using the concepts of digital drama and digital over-engagement, established as well as emerging scholars in marketing, advertising, and communications present research on some unintended consequences of social media including body shaming, online fraud, cyberbullying, online brand protests, social media addiction, privacy, and revenge pornography. It is a must-read for scholars, practitioners, and students interested in consumer psychology, consumer behavior, social media, advertising, marketing, sociology, science and technology management, public relations, and communication.

Consumer Research

Consumer Research PDF Author: Morris B. Holbrook
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 0803972970
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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"Once again, Morris B. Holbrook has combined insightful commentary on the field of consumer behavior with a readable and enjoyable writing style. A must read for anyone interested in the latest thinking in the field." Ron Hill, Professor and Chair of Marketing, Villanova University "A delightfully idiosyncratic history of consumer research. What enthralled readers will get from his stylish exposition is a socio-psychocultural description of the consumer through the ages, along with a description of attempts to understand the consumer. Scholarly yet readable, Holbrook's history is a classic study of consumerism too. Editor's Choice." --Business Today In recent years, consumer research has emerged as an academic specialty of growing concern to marketing scholars and of increased importance on today's university campuses. Courses on consumer behavior--taught in virtually every academic program of business or management--draw heavily on work by consumer researchers. Despite this wide and growing recognition as an emergent area of study, no book appears to exist on the history, nature, and types of consumer research or on the variegated and often hotly debated issues that surround this field of inquiry. Consumer Research fills this gap by providing an account of the recent historical developments in consumer research and by showing how the evolution of this discipline has affected the research. The author offers a personal and subjective glance at how various changes in the field have come about and how they have shaped studies of consumption. Marketing scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduates concentrating in marketing will find Consumer Research irresistible reading.

Consumer Behavior in the Digital Age

Consumer Behavior in the Digital Age PDF Author: Carolin Siepmann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Essays on Firm Strategies and Consumer Dynamics in Socially Embedded Technology Networks

Essays on Firm Strategies and Consumer Dynamics in Socially Embedded Technology Networks PDF Author: Rajiv Mukherjee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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It is of deep interest to researchers and practitioners in Information System (IS) to understand the efficacy of the traditional IS and economics theory in modern business environments such as online social networks. In the pursuit to understand such new IS phenomenon and address the gap in extant literature, my dissertation, identifies the strategies that the firms should incorporate in the presence of network effects; i.e., the increases in benefits accrued by a network user with an increase in the number of users, and its impact on consumer behavior. My first essay, challenges the traditional notion that network effects create a strong protective moat for the incumbent in network competition. I show that network effects are over rated in multi-homing setting, where users can co-exist across multiple networks under resource constraints. Over reliance on the strength of network effects by the incumbent firm in multi-homing setting, stems from extant economic theory that is applicable to single homing networks, where users has to choose one of the available networks. The first essay recommends strategies for the level of innovation and its time of delivery that firms should incorporate in order to survive and succeed in multi-homing environment. While the first essay focuses on multi-homing and the strength of network effects, the second essay revisits firm's preemption strategy in single homing setting with network effects, in order to prevent its users from migrating to a new entrant with better technology. I find that, for moderate levels of price and innovation competition, an incumbent with high reputation is better off being non-committal in its preemption. In contrast, committal preemption is apt for other combinations of reputation, innovation and price. While the first two essays focus on the impact of consumer behavior on firm strategies, the third essay delves into the impact of firm strategies on consumer behavior. In particular, I identify identity revelation policies that increase the number of successful transactions and collaborations in a socially embedded marketplace. The results imply that revealing social identities may be detrimental to negotiation and collaboration in a socially embedded marketplace -- a notion that is counter intuitive to networks that are inherently social.

Selected Essays on Corporate Reputation and Social Media

Selected Essays on Corporate Reputation and Social Media PDF Author: Markus Kick
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3658088370
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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​In four empirical studies, this cumulative work provides valuable insights for marketing executives of statutory health insurance funds and social media responsible. Paper I and II provide evidence about the importance and interplay of price and corporate reputation on the market of statutory health insurance. The second part changes perspective to corporate communication issues in the social media environment. By introducing the “social media brand value chain” paper III conducts a literature review of state of the art social media research. By means of a field experiment on Facebook, paper IV shows that brands do not necessarily have to communicate via their brand fan pages in a highly interactive and vivid way to positively influence attitudinal measures among their fan base.

Consumer Behaviour in the 21st Century

Consumer Behaviour in the 21st Century PDF Author: Lisa Carola Holthoff
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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