Online reviews are a crucial source of information for consumer decision making. Many businesses, companies, and platforms are interested in encouraging more consumers to review their products but are dubious about using financial incentives to buy online reviews. Our research describes a social way of growing online reviews. We show that cultivating an online community for reviewing by showing members reviews written by their online friends cannot only increasing their willingness to contribute but also the quality of the resulting reviews. The takeaways of this study include (1) unlike using financial rewards to incentivize review contribution, the studied approach can motivate review contributions without compromising the quality of reviews contributed; (2) the effect of exposing consumers to their friends’ reviews is comparable to that of Yelp’s weekly newsletters (thus this can be a powerful way of motivating consumer reviews); and (3) to effectively leverage friend reviews, online platforms should facilitate social networking among users and build an online community that recognizes and rewards members who make frequent, high-quality contributions to online reviews.

Understanding relative statures of channels for disseminating knowledge is of practical interest to both generators and consumers of knowledge flows. For generators, stature can influence attractiveness of alternative dissemination routes and deliberations of those who assess generator performance. For knowledge consumers, channel stature may influence knowledge content to which they are exposed. This study introduces a novel approach to conceptualizing and measuring stature of knowledge‐dissemination channels: the power‐impact (PI) technique. It is a flexible technique having 3 complementary variants, giving holistic insights about channel stature by accounting for both attraction of knowledge generators to a distribution channel and degree to which knowledge consumers choose to use a channel's knowledge content. Each PI variant is expressed in terms of multiple parameters, permitting customization of stature evaluation to suit its user's preferences. In the spirit of analytics, each PI variant is driven by objective evidence of actual behaviors. The PI technique is based on 2 building blocks: (a) power that channels have for attracting results of generators' knowledge work, and (b) impact that channel contents' exhibit on prospective recipients. Feasibility and functionality of the PI‐technique design are demonstrated by applying it to solve a problem of journal stature evaluation for the information‐systems discipline.

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A key to the content diversity on user‐generated content platforms is what subject users choose to contribute on. This research investigates how two factors can shape contributors’ subject choice decisions, namely, the amount of existing content and content contributed by online friends or “friend content.” Our experimental findings show that both the amount of existing content and friend content can shape a contributor's subject choice decisions: ceteris paribus, contributors prefer subjects with less existing content and ones with friend content when the amount of existing content is the same. In addition, contributors’ preference for subjects with friend content weakens as the amount of existing content on other subject's decreases. Our findings hold important implications for research and practice in user‐generated content platforms and beyond.

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