Online Herd Behavior in Virtual Communities

Online Herd Behavior in Virtual Communities

Yi-Fen Chen, Meny-Wei Shen, Jing-Sian Lai, Chih-Wei Lai
Copyright: © 2022 |Pages: 16
DOI: 10.4018/IJIDE.303609
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Abstract

Previous studies on WOM have stressed the importance of peer consumer reviews in making purchase decision. When people follow the others purchase decision on the Internet, online herd behavior occurs. This paper presents three experiments that examine herd behavior in virtual communities: In experiment 1, a 2 (Volume: sales/recommendation) online experiment was conducted. Experiment 2 investigated herd effects using a 2 (Number of volume: relative/absolute)　×　2 (Number of scale: large/small) online experiment. Online experiment 3 examined herd effects using a 2 (Number of experience-sharing messages: more/fewer) × 2 (Number of recommendations: more/fewer) online experiment. These experiments involved 484 people in a Taiwanese virtual community. Results demonstrated that consumer recommendation volume causes significantly more frequent online herd behavior compared with sales volume. This study advances the literature on online herd behavior in virtual communities.
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Literature Review And Hypotheses

Online Herd Behavior

Previous studies have demonstrated that others influence people in decision-making (Asch, 1956; Lascu and Zinkhan, 1999; Xue, Dong, Gao, Yu and Taras, 2020). Deutsch and Gerard (1995) distinguished two influence types: normative and informational. Conformance thus emerges in social media and other online communities (De Bruyn and Lilien, 2008; Trusov, Bodapati and Bucklin, 2010). Normative influence describes occurrences in which individuals conform to others’ expectations. Conversely, informational influence is the tendency to accept information received from others as an indicator of reality (Chen, 2008). When making purchasing decisions, people like to mimic the actions of their peers, which results in herd behavior (Chen, Li, Davison and Liu, 2021). Chen (2008) demonstrated that others influence people in making decisions. However, informational influence is stronger than normative influence. Thus, to help us understand the potential of online herd behavior to influence consumer choices, this investigation focuses on virtual communities’ informational influence. Virtual community members can interact and exchange views while customizing information to provide sales and recommendation data.

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