Social influence and the choice of product upgrades: evidence from virtual product adoption in online games

IF 5.9 3区管理学 Q1 BUSINESS

Internet Research Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI:10.1108/intr-01-2022-0021

Qing Huang, Xiaoling Li, Dianwen Wang

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Purpose

Previous studies on social influence and virtual product adoption have mainly taken users’ purchase behavior as a dichotomous variable (i.e. purchasing or not). Given the prevalence of competing versions (basic vs upgraded) of a virtual product in online communities, this paper investigated the differences in the effect of social influence on users’ adoption of basic and upgraded choices of a virtual product. It also examined how the effect varies with users’ social status and user-level network density.

Design/methodology/approach

A natural experiment was conducted in an online game community. Two competing versions (basic vs upgraded) of a virtual product were provided for in-game purchase while a random set of users selected from 897,765 players received the notification of their friends’ adoption information. A competing-risk model was used to test the hypotheses.

Findings

Social influence exerts a stronger positive effect on users’ adoption of the upgraded virtual product than of the basic virtual product. Middle-status users have the greatest (least) susceptibility to social influence in adopting the upgraded (basic) virtual product than low- and high-status users. User’s network density enhances the effect of social influence on adoption of both virtual products, even more for the upgraded one.

Originality/value

This research contributes to the social influence and product adoption literature by disentangling the different effects of social influence on basic and upgraded versions of a virtual product. It also identifies the boundary conditions that social influence works for each version of the virtual product.

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社会影响与产品升级选择：网络游戏中虚拟产品采用的证据

目的以往关于社会影响和虚拟产品采用的研究主要将用户的购买行为作为二分变量（即购买或不购买）。鉴于网络社区中普遍存在虚拟产品的竞争版本（基本版本和升级版本），本文研究了社会影响对用户采用虚拟产品基本版本和升级版本的影响差异。本文在一个网络游戏社区中进行了自然实验。在从 897,765 名玩家中随机抽取的一组用户收到其好友的采用信息通知的同时，游戏中提供了两种相互竞争的虚拟产品版本（基础版和升级版）供玩家购买。结果与基本虚拟产品相比，社会影响对用户采用升级版虚拟产品产生了更大的积极影响。与低地位和高地位用户相比，中等地位用户在采用升级版（基本版）虚拟产品时最容易（最不容易）受到社会影响。用户的网络密度增强了社会影响对采用这两种虚拟产品的影响，对升级版虚拟产品的影响更大。研究还确定了社会影响对每个虚拟产品版本起作用的边界条件。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Internet Research 工程技术-电信学

CiteScore

11.20

自引率

10.20%

发文量

审稿时长

>12 weeks

期刊介绍： This wide-ranging interdisciplinary journal looks at the social, ethical, economic and political implications of the internet. Recent issues have focused on online and mobile gaming, the sharing economy, and the dark side of social media.