Learning from Online Social Ties

We ask whether online opinions impact consumers’ decision quality and assess whether this impact occurs immediately or requires one to undergo learning first. We focus on a setting where consumers have multiple learning experiences using opinions from both uni- and bidirectional network ties. This allows us to investigate the impact of learning from both weak and strong ties. We find that, with sufficient experience, having more ties may lead to better decisions. However, the dynamic effects are dependent on the strength of the tie. Additional strong ties (operationalized as bidirectional links) lead to immediate positive effects on decision quality. However, additional weak ties (unidirectional, follower relationships) initially lead to lower decision quality. We find beneficial learning effects, however: adding more weak ties improves decision quality once one has sufficient experience in the community. Indeed, more-experienced consumers receive, ultimately, higher positive effects on decision quality from weak ties compared with strong ties. We interpret this as demonstrating that one needs to learn the norms of a new community before using the available information to improve decisions. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2017.1076 .