Does Social Influence Change with Other Information Sources? A Large-Scale Randomized Experiment in Medical Crowdfunding
通过大规模随机实验发现，社会影响对捐赠可能性的作用取决于案例其他信息源的信息价值，高信息价值案例中社会影响不显著，低信息价值案例中社会影响显著提升捐赠率，促进资源更平等分配。
We examine how social influence interacts with other information sources to affect user behaviors in the context of medical crowdfunding. We conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment on a leading medical crowdfunding platform, showing friends’ donation information to donors in the treatment group and not showing such information in the control group, and examine how the likelihood to donate differs. In addition, we conduct a survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk to evaluate the informational value of different case attributes in conveying the patients’ need for help to donors. We find that for cases containing attributes with high informational value (e.g., minor patient, severe conditions), social influence is insignificant. In contrast, for cases lacking attributes with high informational value, social influence significantly increases donors’ likelihood to donate. Overall, our results show that the impact of social influence depends on the informational value of other information sources, suggesting that the social influence in our context is primarily informational. Our findings indicate that rather than generating an entrenchment effect, where cases with attributes of high informational value attract disproportionate benefits, social influence can increase donation likelihood to cases that lack such attributes, promoting more equal access to resources overall. History: Olivia Liu Sheng, Senior Editor; Yuliang (Oliver) Yao, Associate Editor. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2022.1189 .