Swayed by Friends or by the Crowd?

TL;DR

This paper empirically investigates how online users are influenced by friend recommendations versus general ratings, revealing that ratings have a stronger impact, especially negative opinions from friends, with behavior varying by decision context.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis comparing the effects of friend recommendations and ratings on online decision-making across diverse demographics.

Findings

Ratings influence choices more than friend recommendations.

Negative opinions from friends are more impactful than positive ones.

Decision context affects the randomness of choices.

Abstract

We have conducted three empirical studies of the effects of friend recommendations and general ratings on how online users make choices. These two components of social influence were investigated through user studies on Mechanical Turk. We find that for a user deciding between two choices an additional rating star has a much larger effect than an additional friend's recommendation on the probability of selecting an item. Equally important, negative opinions from friends are more influential than positive opinions, and people exhibit more random behavior in their choices when the decision involves less cost and risk. Our results can be generalized across different demographics, implying that individuals trade off recommendations from friends and ratings in a similar fashion.