Title
Swayed by friends or by the crowd?
Abstract
We have conducted three empirical studies of the effects of friend recommendations and general ratings on how online users make choices. We model and quantify how a user deciding between two choices trades off an additional rating star with an additional friend's recommendation when selecting an item. We find that negative opinions from friends are more influential than positive opinions, and people exhibit "more random" behavior in their choices when the decision involves less cost and risk. Our results are quite general in the sense that people across different demographics trade off recommendations from friends and ratings from the general public in a similar fashion.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1007/978-3-642-35386-4_27
social informatics
Keywords
DocType
Volume
general public,different demographics,negative opinion,people exhibit,friend recommendation,additional rating star,empirical study,general rating,additional friend,choices trade,social media,recommender systems,social influence
Conference
abs/1111.0307
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0302-9743
4
0.49
References 
Authors
16
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zeinab Abbassi1744.90
Christina Aperjis215712.64
Bernardo A. Huberman370711187.06