“Ten Million Readers Can’t Be Wrong!,” or Can They? On the Role of Information About Adoption Stock in New Product Trial

Abstract

Abstract. Most new-product frameworks in marketing and economics, as well as lay beliefs and practices, hold that the larger the stock of adoption of a new product, the greater the likelihood of additional adoption. Less is known about the underlying mechanisms as well as the conditions under which this central assumption holds. We use a series of field and consequential choice experiments to demonstrate the existence of nonpositive and even negative effects of large adoption stock information on the likelihood of subsequent adoption. The results highlight the degree of homophily with the adopting stock as well as the level of customer uncertainty as key characteristics determining the nature of the effect of stock information. In particular, information about a large existing adoption stock generates a positive effect on adoption only under moderate customer uncertainty combined with sufficient homophily; in other levels of uncertainty and/or homophily we find effects ranging from null to negative. This is the first direct test and demonstration of the intricate role of information about a large stock of adoption in the new product diffusion process, and it carries direct implications for marketers.

Adoption as a social marker: Innovation diffusion with outgroup aversion

“…For example, in one study, Stanford undergraduates evaluated an mp3 player substantially less favorably after being told that it was popular with "business executives" (whom they rated as dissimilar but not disliked) compared with when they were told it was popular with "individuals" (Berger & Heath 2007, study 4). Conversely, Morvinski et al (2014) found that information about a large number of previous adopters positively influenced adoption only if those previous adopters were described as similar to the potential adopters. In another study, after adopting a charity-affiliated bracelet, students from a "jock" dorm dis-adopted (i.e., stopped wearing the bracelet) when the bracelet started appearing on the wrists of students from the nearby "nerdy" dorm, whom the jocks did not dislike but also did not want to be mistaken for (Berger & Heath 2008, study 2).…”

Making Recommendations More Effective Through Framings: Impacts of User- Versus Item-Based Framings on Recommendation Click-Throughs

“…Notably, user-based framing also suggests taste matching (users' shared taste in the focal product) as the basis for recommendation, such that it offers informational value beyond that provided by item-based framing. According to advice-taking research, consumers extract information from others' tastes to predict their own satisfaction with unfamiliar products (Morvinski, Amir, and Muller 2017;Yaniv, Choshen-Hillel, and Milyavsky 2011) and tend to adopt others' preferences if they believe those others' tastes match their own (Hilmert, Kulik, and Christenfeld 2006;Naylor, Lamberton, and Norton 2011). Therefore, we reason that user-based framing offers additional information (i.e., about others' tastes) that can reduce customers' uncertainty about whether they will like or dislike the recommended item.…”

The role of trust in information adoption in social commerce: A PLS approach

“…Accordingly, the information adoption of the transaction must be established so that users or customers can decide whether to participate or shop online and thus it is important both academically and practically (Erkan & Evans, 2016). It should be noted that transactions in virtual communities have social identities and thus, hides the uncertainty and complexity of social interactions in general (Luhmann, 1979;Morvinski, Amir, & Muller, 2017). To explore such social problems, trust was used as a central concept (Gefen, Karahanna, & Straub, 2003;Lewis & Weigert, 1985).…”

“…According to Lewis and Weigert (1985), trust as a social reality of modern life is a property of the collective units (community), not of isolated individuals, and is therefore determined by social characteristics more than personality or even personal psychologic states. Functionally, trust is a strategic alternative or complementary possibly to rational prediction that is basically being applied to deal with the processes of social reality being more and more risky and rapidly changing (Lewis & Weigert, 1985) such as e-commerce and s-commerce in recent years (Gefen et al, 2003;Morvinski et al, 2017). The paper proposes the use of trust instead of information usefulness as it is used in the majority of existing studies (e.g., Erkan & Evans, 2016;Sussman & Siegal, 2003) as a determinant to explain the information adoption of the customer in s-commerce.…”

“…Another notable feature of the information in s-commerce is the increasingly important role of e-WOM of the community of respective websites, including buyers, potential customers, service & product experts and other stakeholders (Hussain et al, 2018;Kim & Park, 2013). These types of information, along with official information from the social networking site's owner, form two kinds of information that must be considered when researching information adoption of social network users in general (Morvinski et al, 2017).…”