Social influence and the choice of product upgrades: evidence from virtual product adoption in online games
Abstract
Purpose
Previous studies on social influence and virtual product adoption have mainly taken users’ purchase behavior as a dichotomous variable (i.e. purchasing or not). Given the prevalence of competing versions (basic vs upgraded) of a virtual product in online communities, this paper investigated the differences in the effect of social influence on users’ adoption of basic and upgraded choices of a virtual product. It also examined how the effect varies with users’ social status and user-level network density.
Design/methodology/approach
A natural experiment was conducted in an online game community. Two competing versions (basic vs upgraded) of a virtual product were provided for in-game purchase while a random set of users selected from 897,765 players received the notification of their friends’ adoption information. A competing-risk model was used to test the hypotheses.
Findings
Social influence exerts a stronger positive effect on users’ adoption of the upgraded virtual product than of the basic virtual product. Middle-status users have the greatest (least) susceptibility to social influence in adopting the upgraded (basic) virtual product than low- and high-status users. User’s network density enhances the effect of social influence on adoption of both virtual products, even more for the upgraded one.
Originality/value
This research contributes to the social influence and product adoption literature by disentangling the different effects of social influence on basic and upgraded versions of a virtual product. It also identifies the boundary conditions that social influence works for each version of the virtual product.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the financial support provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71672192, 71972021, 91746206), the Ministry of Education Research of Social Sciences Youth funded projects (No, 18XJA630004), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Cultivation of High-Level Talents of Chongqing Technology and Business University (No.2255035).
This study is based on the authors’ conference paper “Social Influence and Multiple Choices: Evidence from Virtual Products Adoption” presented at 18th Annual Wuhan International Conference on E-Business (WHICEB) authored by Huang, Q. and Wang, D.W. (2019).
Xiaoling Li and Qing Huang contributed equally in this paper.
Citation
Huang, Q., Li, X. and Wang, D. (2024), "Social influence and the choice of product upgrades: evidence from virtual product adoption in online games", Internet Research, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/INTR-01-2022-0021
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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