Social conventions change when individuals collectively adopt an alternative over the status quo, in a process known as social diffusion. Our repeated trials of a multi-round experiment provided data that helped motivate the proposal of an agent-based model of social diffusion that incorporates inertia and trend-seeking, two behavioural mechanisms that are well documented in the social psychology literature. The former causes people to stick with their current decision, the latter creates sensitivity to population-level changes. We show that such inclusion resolves the contradictions of existing models, allowing to reproduce patterns of social diffusion which are consistent with our data and existing empirical observations at both the individual and population level. The model reveals how the emergent population-level diffusion pattern is critically shaped by the two individual-level mechanisms; trend-seeking guarantees the diffusion is explosive after the diffusion process takes off, but inertia can greatly delay the time to take-off.

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.

In this paper, we assess two alternative indicators of opinion leadership, self-reported opinion leadership and degree centrality, on the same dataset. We also investigate the interaction effect of these two indicators and the social network environment on opinion leadership. We use social network and survey data from the mobile telecom industry to analyze opinion leadership in smartphone adoption. We find that degree centrality indicates opinion leadership, but that self-reported opinion leadership indicates opinion leadership only under the right social circumstances. In case of weak to moderate network ties, the effect of self-reported opinion leadership is not significant. However, self-reported opinion leaders more effectively influence their strong ties. This study sheds light on indicators of opinion leadership and provides insights for managers to improve their social marketing campaigns.

Longitudinal data of charity donation decisions reveal patterns in line with moral consistency as well as moral licensing.