Social Dollars in Online Communities: The Effect of Product, User, and Network Characteristics

Online communities have experienced burgeoning popularity over the last decade and have become a key platform for users to share information and interests, and to engage in social interactions. Drawing on the social contagion literature, the authors examine the effect of online social connections on users’ product purchases in an online community. They assess how product, user, and network characteristics influence the social contagion effect in users’ spending behavior. The authors use a unique large-scale data set from a popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game community—consisting of users’ detailed gaming activities, their social connections, and their in-game purchases of functional and hedonic products—to examine the impact of gamers’ social networks on their purchase behavior. The analysis, based on a double-hurdle model that captures gamers’ decisions of playing and spending levels, reveals evidence of “social dollars,” whereby social interaction between gamers in the community increases their in-game product purchases. Interestingly, the results indicate that social influence varies across different types of products. Specifically, the effect of a focal user's network ties on his or her spending on hedonic products is greater than the effect of network ties on the focal user's spending on functional products. Furthermore, the authors find that user experience negatively moderates social contagion for functional products, whereas it positively moderates contagion for hedonic products. In addition, dense networks enhance contagion over functional product purchases, whereas they mitigate the social influence effect over hedonic product purchases. The authors perform a series of tests and robustness checks to rule out the effect of confounding factors. They supplement their econometric analyses with dynamic matching techniques and estimate average treatment effects. The results of the study have implications for both theory and practice and help provide insights on how managers can monetize social networks and use social information to increase user engagement in online communities.