The Impact of User Personality Traits on Word of Mouth: Text-Mining Social Media Platforms
Authors: Adamopoulos, Panagiotis; Ghose, Anindya; Todri, Vilma
Journal: Information Systems Research (2018)
<jats:p>Word of mouth (WOM) plays an increasingly important role in shaping consumers’ behavior and preferences. In this paper, we examine whether latent personality traits of online users accentuate or attenuate the effectiveness of WOM in social media platforms. To answer this question, we leverage machine-learning methods in combination with econometric techniques utilizing a novel quasi-experiment. Our analysis yields two main results. First, there is a positive and statistically significant effect of the level of personality similarity between two social media users on the likelihood of a subsequent purchase from a recipient of a WOM message after exposure to the WOM message of the sender. In particular, exposure to WOM messages from similar users in terms of personality, rather than dissimilar users, increases the likelihood of a postpurchase by 47.58%. Second, there are statistically significant effects of specific pairwise combinations of personality characteristics of senders and recipients of WOM messages on the effectiveness of WOM. For instance, introverted users are responsive to WOM, in contrast to extroverted users. Besides this, agreeable, conscientious, and open s…