Charts and demand: Empirical generalizations on social influence

Olaf Maecker, Nadja Sophia Grabenströer, Michel Clement and Mark Heitmann

International Journal of Research in Marketing, 2013, vol. 30, issue 4, 429-431

Abstract: Social influence on consumer behavior has long been a subject of academic research in various scientific fields. According to research by Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006), music demand is a function of social influence between consumers. Market concentration tends to increase when information on demand becomes publicly available. In addition, stochastic agglomeration caused by social influence decreases the predictability of market success. These heavily cited findings challenge traditional market research and provide important insights on the impact of social media and sales charts. We test the stability of their results by replicating the study on music demand in a slightly different setting. We further investigate the generalizability of findings by probing other product categories and different phases of purchase decisions, i.e., interest, consideration, and actual demand. Across all categories and across all dependent variables, we are able to replicate the direction of the effects. We do, however, consistently obtain smaller effect sizes than reported in the original paper.

Keywords: Consumer behavior; Electronic commerce and Internet marketing; Hedonic products; Market analysis and response; Experimental research (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ijrema:v:30:y:2013:i:4:p:429-431

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijresmar.2013.08.001

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