Hans Risselada

Customer-to-Customer Interactions: Broadening the Scope of Word of Mouth Research

The increasing emphasis on understanding the antecedents and consequences of customer-to-customer (C2C) interactions is one of the essential developments of customer management in recent years. This interest is driven much by new online environments that enable customers to be connected in numerous new ways and also supply researchers’ access to rich C2C data. These developments present an opportunity and a challenge for firms and researchers who need to identify the aspects of C2C research on which to focus, as well as develop research methods that take advantage of these new data. The aim here is to take a broad view of C2C interactions and their effects and to highlight areas of significant research interest in this domain. The authors look at four main areas: the different dimensions of C2C interactions; social system issues related to individuals and to online communities; C2C context issues including product, channel, relational and market characteristics; and the identification, modeling, and assessment of business outcomes of C2C interactions.

Dynamic Effects of Social Influence and Direct Marketing on the Adoption of High-Technology Products

Many firms capitalize on their customers’ social networks to improve the success rate of their new products. In this article, the authors analyze the dynamic effects of social influence and direct marketing on the adoption of a new high-technology product. Social influence is likely to play a role because the decision to adopt a high-involvement product requires extensive information gathering from various sources. The authors use call detail records to construct ego networks for a large sample of customers of a Dutch mobile telecommunications operator. Using a fractional polynomial hazard approach to model adoption timing and multiple social influence variables, they provide a fine-grained analysis of social influence. They show that the effect of social influence from cumulative adoptions in a customers network decreases from the product introduction onward, whereas the influence of recent adoptions remains constant. The effect of direct marketing is also positive and decreases from the product introduction onward. This study provides new insights into the adoption of high-technology products by analyzing dynamic effects of social influence and direct marketing simultaneously.

The impact of social influence on the perceived helpfulness of online consumer reviews

Purpose This study aims to study to what extent the helpfulness votes others attach to a review affect a consumer’s perceived helpfulness of that review. In addition, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether this social influence moderates the relationships among several content presentation factors and perceived helpfulness. Design/methodology/approach A choice-based conjoint experiment was carried out in which 201 respondents evaluated different reviews and chose the review they perceive as most helpful. Findings Consumers perceive reviews as more (less) helpful in the presence of clearly valenced positive (negative) helpfulness votes. In addition, helpfulness votes of others diminish the positive impact of structure and the negative impact of spelling errors. Research limitations/implications The experimental setup may limit the external validity of the study. Practical implications Providing a helpfulness button gives firms an instrument to offer content that consumers perceive as more useful and to exert some influence on the effects of content presentation factors on the review’s helpfulness. Social implications Consumers tend to follow other consumers’ opinions without forming their own opinion. Firms could misuse this tendency by hiring people to vote on reviews that are not necessarily helpful for consumers, but are helpful for the firm. Originality/value This study is the first to assess the extent to which social influence affects consumers’ evaluation of reviews. Given that consumers use helpfulness votes to distinguish reviews, it is important to understand to what extent these votes reflect the actual helpfulness of the information in the review and to what extent they reflect previous helpfulness votes.

Dynamics in charity donation decisions: Insights from a large longitudinal data set

Longitudinal data of charity donation decisions reveal patterns in line with moral consistency as well as moral licensing. Despite the vast body of research on charitable giving and its drivers, no research has investigated the longitudinal dynamics of individual donation decisions. We analyzed unique data with nearly 300,000 real donation decisions made by more than 20,000 individuals for a period of 10 months. Each decision entailed a choice of what to do with money received for completing a survey (on average, €0.67 per survey): keep it or donate to charity. We found that most of the participants (89%) always chose to keep the money. Within the group of people who sometimes kept and sometimes donated the money (that is, Switchers), we find that people do not change their decision very often (cf. moral consistency). However, the likelihood of donating increases when people kept the money the previous time, and the amount at stake differs substantially (both positively and negatively). Finally, once Switchers donated, they are more likely to keep the money next time if they can earn more (for example, €2 now versus €0.50 last time), signaling moral compensation. These longitudinal data provide a first step to better understand charity donation decisions, not only in terms of a more nuanced description of decision-makers but also in terms of the dynamics of charity donations.