Online Social Interactions: A Natural Experiment on Word of Mouth versus Observational Learning

Consumers’ purchase decisions can be influenced by others’ opinions, or word of mouth (WOM), and/or others’ actions, or observational learning (OL). Although information technologies are creating increasing opportunities for firms to facilitate and manage these two types of social interaction, to date, researchers have encountered difficulty in disentangling their competing effects and have provided limited insights into how these two social influences might differ from and interact with each other. Using a unique natural experimental setting resulting from information policy shifts at the online seller Amazon.com , the authors design three longitudinal, quasi-experimental field studies to examine three issues…