How Does Popularity Information Affect Choices? A Field Experiment

Catherine Tucker and Juanjuan Zhang

Management Science, 2011, vol. 57, issue 5, 828-842

Abstract: Popularity information is usually thought to reinforce existing sales trends by encouraging customers to flock to mainstream products with broad appeal. We suggest a countervailing market force: popularity information may benefit niche products with narrow appeal disproportionately, because the same level of popularity implies higher quality for narrow-appeal products than for broad-appeal products. We examine this hypothesis empirically using field experiment data from a website that lists wedding service vendors. Our findings are consistent with this hypothesis: narrow-appeal vendors receive more visits than equally popular broad-appeal vendors after the introduction of popularity information. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.

Keywords: popularity information; observational learning; field experiment; Internet marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (127)

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