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smaller than that of a broad-appeal product. This suggests the same kind of quality
inference may lead to different purchase behavior when taking the congruency of different
types of popularity information into consideration. Nevertheless, while the quality
evaluation seems to be the dominant inference in this field, Salganik, Dodds, and Watts’s
(2006) research results showed that a product’s quality may not necessarily lead to a
product’s success in sales, suggesting that product quality is not the only dominant
inference when viewing popularity information. Instead, an alternative social-related
inference may drive consumers to alter purchase decisions (Sridhar and Srinivasan, 2012).
However, to the best of our knowledge, little research has empirically investigated
popularity information based on the social-related inference.
Therefore, this research intends to fill in the gap by extending the prior work in
several ways. First, it further explores the effect of popularity information based on a
social-related inference - social comparison, which is a prominent kind of social influence
on every human being. Second, the research makes direct comparisons between different
inferences (i.e., quality evaluation vs. social comparison) and examines how these
inferences moderate the relationship between popularity information and online purchases.
Third, the researchers investigate how the congruency of two types of commonly
coexisting popularity information— sales volume and breadth of appeal, jointly impact
consumers’ online purchases. We believe two dominant inferences (i.e., quality evaluation
vs. social comparison) may impact the conditions of congruence and incongruence
differently and thus lead to different purchase decisions in e-commerce. The contributions
of this research should allow the power of popularity information to be more broadly
applied to different conditions and provide meaningful recommendations for e-commerce
on how to strategically highlight popularity information for products with different
breadth of appeal.
2. Literature Review
Popularity information is an indicator that reflects the preferences of earlier
consumers (Duan, Gu, and Whinston, 2009), and can be displayed in different formations.
Firstly, a product’s sales volume reflects consumer’s actual purchase decision, and is
usually displayed in a numeric format (Gu, Tang, and Whinston, 2013). Second, a
product’s natural breadth of appeal refers to the range of consumers’ tastes, suggesting a
product’s potential sales conducive to consumers’ preferences (Tucker and Zhang, 2011).
A broad-appeal product caters to a broad range of tastes and therefore enjoys a higher