How Does Popularity Information Affect Choices? A Field Experiment
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Author(s)
Tucker, Catherine Elizabeth
Zhang, Juanjuan
Date Issued
May 2011
Journal
Management Science
Publisher
INFORMS
Citation
Tucker, Catherine, and Juanjuan Zhang. “How Does Popularity Information Affect Choices? A Field Experiment.” Management Science 57.5 (2011) : 828-842.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Popularity information is usually thought to reinforce existing sales trends by encour-
aging customers to
ock to mainstream products with broad appeal. We suggest a
countervailing market force: popularity information may bene t niche products with
narrow appeal disproportionately, because the same level of popularity implies higher
quality for narrow-appeal products than for broad-appeal products. We examine this
hypothesis empirically using eld experiment data from a web site that lists wed-
ding service vendors. Our ndings are consistent with this hypothesis: narrow-appeal
vendors receive more visits than equally popular broad-appeal vendors after the intro-
duction of popularity information.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1110.1312
