In markets with search frictions, consumers can acquire information about goods either through costly search or from friends via word-of-mouth (WOM) communication. How do sellers’ market power react to a very large increase in the number of consumers’ friends with whom they engage in WOM?...

Consumers can acquire information through their own search efforts or through their social network. Information diffusion via word-of-mouth communication leads to some consumers free-riding on their “friends” and less information acquisition via active search. Free-riding also has an...

Word-of-mouth (WOM) plays an increasingly important role today in shaping consumers' attitudes and buying behaviors. Prior work in marketing has mainly focused on the aggregate impact of WOM on product sales as well as the generation of WOM. Very little attention has been paid to the consumption...

We quantify the effects of others' adoptions and word-of-mouth (volume and valence) on consumers' product adoption decisions. We differentiate between the effects of word-of-mouth and observed adoptions from friends ("personal network") and the effects of word-of-mouth and observed adoptions...

Managers are very interested in word of mouth communication because they believe that a product's success is related to the word of mouth that it generates. However, there are at least three significant challenges associated with measuring word of mouth. First, how does one even gather the data?...

Researchers and brand managers have limited understanding of the effects of firm-created and user-generated social media communication on brand equity, brand attitude, and purchase intention. Thus, we investigated 504 Facebook users using a standardized online survey across Poland. To test the...

We study peer influence in an online social network on a platform where consumers purchase music albums. They can follow their peers and become informed about their consumption choices. In particular, we are interested in how this affects consumers’ exploration of new music that exhibits...

As much as forty percent of social media users have been harassed online, but there is scarce causal evidence of how toxic content impacts user engagement and whether it is contagious. In a pre-registered field experiment, we recruited participants to install a browser extension, and randomly...