Professor Sarang Sunder
The talk started with Professor Sunder speaking about the initial idea based on his colleague’s obsession with board games and the existence of an online board game rating community. They wanted to find out whether there were ‘snowballs’, with good ratings becoming better or bad ratings become worse. They also wanted to find out whether the ‘wisdom in the crowd’ is dependent on the networks of the consumer and they wanted to empirically disentangle the components of the crowd.
Professor Sunder then spoke about the overarching theoretical lens, the model used and the measures in the model (crowd, friends, user experience and firm domain experience). They found that information cascades or snowballs even in post purchase evaluations. In addition to this, they found that crowd influence decreases when firm influence and user expertise increases. Friend effect, however, increases when user experience increases.
This means that there is wisdom amongst the crowd and friends. There is conformity in the user’s social network but not so much within the crowd. Social multipliers are not always consistent and consumers always look for more diagnostic information even from the company itself. This implies that brands can signal expertise through product strategy. This signal can weaken the positive effect of the social multiplier. In other words, if the brand’s ‘expert opinion’ differs from the crowd’s opinion, consumers are more likely to conform to the brand’s opinion, weakening the social multiplier effect.
This study unpacked causal social effects into friend and crowd effects. It is the first study to empirically disentangle the crowd effect and look into contingency factors that govern the social multiplier effect. From an implications-standpoint, there are three stakeholders which can use this information immediately. One, it can be used by online reputation management. Two, the study may have an influence on product and post product strategy of firms and three, it may have an impact on online platform design for different firms.
The discussion ended with the attendees asking engaging questions about the study.
