SOBACO

Select Social Media Papers from Carlson School of Management faculty*

Gediminas Adomavicius*, Jesse Bockstedt, Shawn Curley*, Jingjing Zhang (2012) "Do Recommender Systems Manipulate Consumer Preferences? A Study of Anchoring Effects", (under review, Information Systems Research).

Recommender systems are becoming a salient part of many social media and e-commerce websites. Much research has focused on advancing recommendation technologies to improve accuracy of predictions, while behavioral aspects of using recommender systems are often overlooked. In this study, we conduct three experiments to explore how consumers' preferences at the time of consumption are affected by their interactions with recommender systems. The results provide strong evidence that the rating presented by a recommender system serves as an anchor for the consumer's constructed preference. The main finding of the study is that the consumers' preference ratings are malleable and can be significantly influenced by the recommendation received.

Ravi Bapna* and Akhmed Umyarov* (2012), "Are Paid Subscriptions on Music Social Networks Contagious? A Randomized Field Experiment," U of Minnesota working paper.

Demonstrating compelling causal evidence of the existence and strength of peer to peer influence in online social networks has become the holy grail of the modern research in online social networks. Among the most frequently cited explanations for this effect are peer influence and homophily, but separating these out from observational data is virtually impossible. In this paper, we present a novel randomized experiment that tests the existence of causal peer influence in the general population of a particular large-scale online social network. We conduct a randomized control trial on a user-base of 4 million listeners of Last.fm, a music listening social network, and show that, for a median social network user, the odds of adopting the paid subscription increase by 116% due to peer influence when her friend adopts it.

Ravi Bapna*, A. Gupta*, S. Rice, A. Sundararajan (2012), "Trust, Reciprocity and the Strength of Social Ties: Economic Experiments on an Online Social Network," U of Minnesota working paper.

Online social networks are credited with inspiring political action, driving viral and word-of-mouth driven spread of products and services and playing a significant role in the diffusion of ideas. A primitive underlying this conjectured "influence" is a notion that people trust the opinions, intentions or actions of individuals they are connected to. We design a novel Facebook application to play a non-anonymous investment game that allows us to study the linkage between strength of social ties and trust. We estimate the marginal effects of three different strength of ties measures computed within Facebook. We find that each wall-post made on a friend's wall results in a 21% increase in trust. Similarly, we find that each photo two friends jointly appear in, a signal of social affinity and physical world ties, is associated with a 5.1% increase in trust. Interestingly, the unconditional correlation between the classic "number of common friends" metric – a widely used strength of ties measure - and trust is not significant.

Yuqing Ren* et al. (forthcoming) "Building Member Attachment in Online Communities: Applying Theories of Group Identity and Interpersonal Bonds", MIS Quarterly.

A challenge businesses face in using social media to engage employees and consumers is to build a vibrant community whose members are actively engaged. We ran a large scale field
experiment to explore two ways to increase member engagement in online communities. Our new features significantly increased member engagement and under some conditions doubled the frequency at which members visit the site.

Ji Lin Chen, Yuqing Ren* and John Riedl (2010) "The Effects of Diversity on Group Productivity and Member Withdrawal in Online Volunteer Groups", CHI Atlanta (under review at Management Science).

Social media technologies have enabled large scale collaboration on the Internet, for instance, among millions of editor who collectively created Wikipedia. We mined a large data dump from Wikipedia to understand the impact and evolution of team diversity in online collaboration. We found overtime, Wikipedia projects tended to converge toward a level of diversity that was optimal for their performance due to its self-organizing nature. It has implications for reconsidering how work is organized in traditional organizations.

Joel Waldfogel* and Lu Chen (2006) "Does Information Undermine Brand? Information Intermediary Use and Preference for Branded Web Retailers, The Journal of Industrial Economics, 54 (4):425-449.

Does Information Undermine Brand - this paper was about social media before we knew them as such. The question is whether consumer feedback about retailers - as reported to information intermediary BizRate in 1999 - made other consumers more willing to stray from well-known branded retailers such as Amazon. The answer is yes.

Ben Shiller and Joel Waldfogel* (2011) "Music for a Song: An Empirical Look at Uniform Pricing and its Alternatives," The Journal of Industrial Economics, 59 (4):425-449.

Music for a Song analyzes the problem of how to price digital products (such as music files at iTunes). The question is whether sophisticated alternatives to uniform a la carte pricing at iTunes could substantially raise revenue. And the answer is yes (by about 20-30 percent).

Hofmann, W., Vohs, K. D.*, & Baumeister, R. F. (in press). "What people desire, feel conflicted about, and try to resist in everyday life," Psychological Science.

People experience a lot of desires in everyday life, be they about basic needs such as food, drink, sex, and sleep, or about more 'modern cravings' such as with regard to smartphones, coffee, or other drugs. Oftentimes, our desires are quite unproblematic, but they can turn into temptations to the extent to which they conflict with important other goals in our lives. The field study (called the Everyday Temptation Study) we conducted was a first investigation into how desire and its control show up in people's everyday environments.

We used experience sampling to measure desires and desire regulation in everyday life. Over the course of a week, 205 adults furnished a total of 7,827 desire reports. Results revealed substantial domain-related differences in desire frequency, strength, and degree of conflict with other goals, as well as in the likelihood and success with which desires are resisted. Desires for sleep and sex were experienced most intensively, whereas desires for tobacco and alcohol had the lowest average desire strength despite being thought of as addictive. Desires for leisure and sleep conflicted the most with other goals, and desires for media and work brought about the most self-control failure.

 

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