How do consumers make behavioural decisions on social commerce platforms? The interaction effect between behaviour visibility and social needs
Authors: Jia, Yanli; Liu, Libo; Lowry, Paul Benjamin
Journal: Information Systems Journal (2024)
DOI: 10.1111/isj.12508
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The online phenomenon of social commerce (i.e., <jats:italic>s‐commerce</jats:italic>) platforms has emerged as a combination of online social networking and e‐commerce. On s‐commerce platforms, consumers can observe others' behavioural decisions and can distinguish those made by their friends from those made by their <jats:italic>followees</jats:italic> (i.e., the people a focal consumer follows but who do not follow that consumer back). Given this distinction, our study examines how consumers' behavioural decisions—regarding, for example, purchases, ratings, or “likes”—are made on s‐commerce platforms, with a focus on how they are influenced by prior decisions of friends and followees. Combining panel data from a large s‐commerce platform and two controlled experiments, we identify a strong normative social influence pattern in which consumers tend to follow others' prior decisions to gain social approval. Because the occurrence of normative social influence depends on both consumer behaviours with high public visibility and strong consumer needs to establish social ties, the unique information concerning behaviour visibility and consumer…