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TIME: Apr. 11 (Friday) noon -- 1:00 pm
PLACE: Hoffman E-Commerce Lab, McClelland Hall 218
SPEAKER: Prof. Yubo Chen, Marketing, Eller College

TITLE: Online Social Interactions: A Natural Experiment on Word of Mouth versus Observational Learning

ABSTRACT:

When making purchase decisions, consumers can be influenced by social interactions in at least two ways: They can be affected by (1) other consumers’ opinions (i.e., via word-of-mouth communication, WOM), and/or (2) other consumers’ actions (i.e., via observational learning, OL).

Based on a unique natural experimental setting resulting from information policy shifts at Amazon.com, we design three longitudinal, quasi-experimental field studies to test our theoretical propositions concerning three essential issues regarding the impacts of the two types of social interaction mentioned above: (1) Whether and how WOM and OL differentially affect consumers’ purchase decisions, (2) how these effects vary over product lifetime, and (3) how WOM and OL interact with each other to jointly influence sales. We find that (1) while negative WOM information is more influential than positive WOM information, the opposite is the case for OL information; (2) the impact of both types of social interaction diminishes over product lifetime; and (3) WOM volume strengthens the sales impact of OL. No evidence attests, however, to an interaction between WOM valence and OL.

SHORT BIO of SPEAKER: Yubo Chen is an assistant professor of marketing at Eller College of Management, University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Florida, M.E. in Systems Engineering and B.E. in Industrial Management Engineering from Southeast University, Nanjing, China. His current research studies 1) how consumer social interactions and social networks are changing the landscape of marketing strategy, and 2) how to use market forces to address sustainability issues. His research has been published in leading academic journals such as Management Science, Marketing Science and Marketing Letters.