Network Ties And Online Word-of-mouth Contribution:An Empirical Study Based On Social Impact Theory

Online Word-of-Mouth(WOM)is consumers contributed content related to products and service on the Internet.Current research indicates that positive online WOM can promote sales while negative online WOM can hurt sales.Given the prevalence and significance of online WOM,both industry and academia have been making great effort to understand it.With the contribution from prior literature,current research focus has been gradually shifted from the consequences to the antecedents of online WOM.What drives consumers to post WOM and what shapes WOM content are questions of interest for firms so that they can derive different implications for their own business.These questions are thus the center of my thesis.Since social network is integrated into many online review platform(e.g.Wechat,Weibo),it's natural to examine what role social network plays in consumers WOM contribution behavior.Therefore,in this research,we mainly investigate the impact of network ties on consumers WOM contribution.Drawing from social impact theory,we argue that network ties are a manifestation of virtual social presence.Under the influence of such social presence,consumers' self-presentation motivation will be activated.Online WOM provides an important channel to achieve the goal of self-presentation and express themselves.Specifically,we predict that network ties will increase consumers WOM volume.This is because WOM volume indicates how frequent consumers engage self-presentation behavior and higher self-presentation motivation should lead to more frequent behavior of self-presenting.Besides,we also predict that network ties will decrease WOM valence.Prior research has shown that negative review is perceived to be more objective and useful and negative reviewers are also perceived to have more expertise.So negative review can be an powerful tool for consumers to self-present.Furthermore,social impact theory also proposes the characteristics of social presence moderate its impact.Therefore,we predict that the impact of network ties on WOM contribution is moderated by ties' temporal recency and strength.For ties with higher temporal recency and strength the effect will be stronger.Using a dataset from Epinion.com,we find that our hypothesis regarding WOM volume is fully supported and hypothesis regarding WOM valence is partially supported.