Who do We Listen to More: Opinion Leaders or Friends? The Social Function of Conformity Behavior in Social Commerce

Abstract

Online social information (e.g., product ratings and product purchase) is widely available on the social commerce sites and is believed to affect userpurchase decisions. Drawing from the prior research on online conformity, we examine any differential impact of the online social information generated by opinion leader versus friends. By analyzing a largescale data collected from a social commerce site, we found that user purchase decisions are influenced by the online social information both by opinion leaders and by friends. However, the information by friends has greater effect in comparison to that by opinion leaders. In addition, our results indicated that female users demonstrate greate..