{"title":"How do consumers make behavioural decisions on social commerce platforms? The interaction effect between behaviour visibility and social needs","authors":"Yanli Jia, Libo Liu, Paul Benjamin Lowry","doi":"10.1111/isj.12508","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>The online phenomenon of social commerce (i.e., <i>s-commerce</i>) platforms has emerged as a combination of online social networking and e-commerce. On s-commerce platforms, consumers can observe others' behavioural decisions and can distinguish those made by their friends from those made by their <i>followees</i> (i.e., the people a focal consumer follows but who do not follow that consumer back). Given this distinction, our study examines how consumers' behavioural decisions—regarding, for example, purchases, ratings, or “likes”—are made on s-commerce platforms, with a focus on how they are influenced by prior decisions of friends and followees. Combining panel data from a large s-commerce platform and two controlled experiments, we identify a strong normative social influence pattern in which consumers tend to follow others' prior decisions to gain social approval. Because the occurrence of normative social influence depends on both consumer behaviours with high public visibility and strong consumer needs to establish social ties, the unique information concerning behaviour visibility and consumers' social needs in the panel data allows us to identify normative social influence and to distinguish it from informational confounding mechanisms. Our panel data results show that on a <i>friend network</i>, where consumers' behavioural decisions are visible, females exhibit a greater tendency to follow others' prior decisions than males. We attribute this result to the stronger social needs of females. However, on a <i>followee network</i>, where behavioural decisions are invisible, these differences become less evident. Moreover, the two experiments demonstrate that making decision contexts private or activating social needs via a priming procedure can thwart (or even turn off) normative social influence. Our findings challenge prior research that identifies informational social influence as the predominant driver of conformity behaviours and thus have important implications for practice related to normative social influence, such as the development of techniques for satisfying consumers' different social needs depending on their gender or any other situational factors on s-commerce platforms.</p>","PeriodicalId":48049,"journal":{"name":"Information Systems Journal","volume":"34 5","pages":"1703-1736"},"PeriodicalIF":6.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/isj.12508","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Information Systems Journal","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/isj.12508","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"INFORMATION SCIENCE & LIBRARY SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The online phenomenon of social commerce (i.e., s-commerce) platforms has emerged as a combination of online social networking and e-commerce. On s-commerce platforms, consumers can observe others' behavioural decisions and can distinguish those made by their friends from those made by their followees (i.e., the people a focal consumer follows but who do not follow that consumer back). Given this distinction, our study examines how consumers' behavioural decisions—regarding, for example, purchases, ratings, or “likes”—are made on s-commerce platforms, with a focus on how they are influenced by prior decisions of friends and followees. Combining panel data from a large s-commerce platform and two controlled experiments, we identify a strong normative social influence pattern in which consumers tend to follow others' prior decisions to gain social approval. Because the occurrence of normative social influence depends on both consumer behaviours with high public visibility and strong consumer needs to establish social ties, the unique information concerning behaviour visibility and consumers' social needs in the panel data allows us to identify normative social influence and to distinguish it from informational confounding mechanisms. Our panel data results show that on a friend network, where consumers' behavioural decisions are visible, females exhibit a greater tendency to follow others' prior decisions than males. We attribute this result to the stronger social needs of females. However, on a followee network, where behavioural decisions are invisible, these differences become less evident. Moreover, the two experiments demonstrate that making decision contexts private or activating social needs via a priming procedure can thwart (or even turn off) normative social influence. Our findings challenge prior research that identifies informational social influence as the predominant driver of conformity behaviours and thus have important implications for practice related to normative social influence, such as the development of techniques for satisfying consumers' different social needs depending on their gender or any other situational factors on s-commerce platforms.
期刊介绍:
The Information Systems Journal (ISJ) is an international journal promoting the study of, and interest in, information systems. Articles are welcome on research, practice, experience, current issues and debates. The ISJ encourages submissions that reflect the wide and interdisciplinary nature of the subject and articles that integrate technological disciplines with social, contextual and management issues, based on research using appropriate research methods.The ISJ has particularly built its reputation by publishing qualitative research and it continues to welcome such papers. Quantitative research papers are also welcome but they need to emphasise the context of the research and the theoretical and practical implications of their findings.The ISJ does not publish purely technical papers.