How Does Popularity Information Affect Choices? A Field Experiment

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.