4:20 PM - 4:40 PM
[1G3-OS-13a-03] How do we harness others’ opinions?
An investigation on product types
Keywords:Nudge, Cognitive Psychology, Consumer Psychology
With the rising of information technology, we can conveniently harness many others' opinions. However, it remains unclear how we utilize them. Online review sites, such as Amazon.com, display a lot of products. Especially, it is well-known that products could have two types of consumption mode: hedonic or utilitarian. In this paper, we examined how these product types affected people's behavior on others' opinions. Concerning others' opinions, we focused on a rating distribution. In our experiment, participants conducted a binary product choice task. The task composed of single product name and two rating distributions which had similar average of ratings but different variance of ratings (high / low). The results showed that product types affected people's choices on rating distributions. For hedonic products, participants tended to prefer high-variance rating distribution more often than for utilitarian products. We discussed how the results emerged and illustrated how our findings could 'nudge' people.