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- Title
How Does Popularity Information Affect Choices? A Field Experiment.
- Authors
Tucker, Catherine; Juanjuan Zhang
- Abstract
Popularity information is usually thought to reinforce existing sales trends by encouraging customers to flock to mainstream products with broad appeal. We suggest a countervailing market force: popularity information may benefit niche products with narrow appeal disproportionately, because the same level of popularity implies higher quality for narrow-appeal products than for broad-appeal products. We examine this hypothesis empirically using field experiment data from a website that lists wedding service vendors. Our findings are consistent with this hypothesis: narrow-appeal vendors receive more visits than equally popular broad-appeal vendors after the introduction of popularity information.
- Subjects
MARKETING research; MOTIVATION research (Marketing); CONSUMER behavior research; CONSUMER attitudes; PRODUCT acceptance; CONSUMER preferences
- Publication
Management Science, 2011, Vol 57, Issue 5, p828
- ISSN
0025-1909
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1287/mnsc.1110.1312