Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Online Content Consumption: Social Endorsements, Observational Learning And Word-Of-Mouth, Qian Tang, Tingting Song, Liangfei Qiu, Ashish Agarwal

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The consumption of online content can occur through observational learning (OL) whereby consumers follow previous consumers’ choices or social endorsement (SE) wherein consumers receive content sharing from their social ties. As users consume content, they also generate post-consumption word-of-mouth (WOM) signals. OL, SE and WOM together shape the diffusion of the content. This study examines the drivers of SE and the effect of SE on content consumption and post-consumption WOM. In particular, we compare SE with OL. Using a random sample of 8,945 new videos posted on YouTube, we collected a multi-platform dataset consisting of data on video consumption and …