Social influence in the digital age: offline, online, and algorithmic impacts on customer outcomes
Modern digital marketplaces expose customers to abundant social information, making social influence a central force in customer decision making. Social influence today operates across multiple information environments, as customer judgments are informed not only by direct interactions with others but also by digitally mediated and algorithmically curated information.
This dissertation examines how social influence operates across offline, online, and algorithmically mediated settings. It adopts a unified perspective to understand how customers respond to information that originates from other customers and is filtered and communicated through digital platforms and artificial intelligence. Chapter 2 investigates offline social influence in an online food delivery context, showing that geographic proximity among customers affects repeat purchase behavior and that this proximity effect varies with local supply- and demand-side characteristics. Chapter 3 examines online social influence on digital platforms, demonstrating how customer reviews are shaped by prior reviews and how managerial responses moderate herding behavior. Chapter 4 focuses on algorithmic social influence, analyzing how AI-generated review summaries influence subsequent customer reviews.
Overall, this dissertation shows that social influence in modern marketplaces consists of offline, online, and algorithmically mediated forms. By integrating these forms of influence, this research advances understanding of how customers process social information in digital marketplaces.