We investigate how different types of social information affect the demand characteristics of firms competing through service quality. We first generate behavioral hypotheses around both consumers' learning behavior and firms' corresponding demand characteristics: market share, demand uncertainty, and rate of convergence. We then conduct a controlled human-subject experiment where a consumer chooses to visit one of two firms, each with unknown service quality, in a repeated interaction and is exposed to different information treatments from a social network: (1) no social information, (2) share-based social information which details the percentage of people that visited each firm, (3) quality-based social information which illustrates the percentage of people that received a satisfactory experience from each firm, or (4) full social information which contains both share-based and quality-based social information. A key insight from our study is that different types of social information have different effects on firms' demand. First, promoting quality-based social information leads to a significantly higher market share, lower demand variability, and faster rate of convergence, for a firm with significantly better service quality. Second, when the higher quality firm has only a marginal advantage over the other firm, promoting only share-based information leads to higher market share and lower demand variability. A third important result is that providing only one type of social information can actually be more helpful to the higher quality firm than providing full social information.

中文翻译：

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消费者从自身经验和社会信息中学习：一项实验研究

我们调查了不同类型的社会信息如何通过服务质量影响企业竞争的需求特征。我们首先围绕消费者的学习行为和企业相应的需求特征生成行为假设：市场份额，需求不确定性和收敛速度。然后，我们进行一个受控的人为对象实验，消费者选择通过重复互动访问两家服务质量未知的公司之一，并从社交网络获得不同的信息处理：（1）没有社交信息，（ 2）基于份额的社交信息，其中详细列出了访问每家公司的人数百分比；（3）基于质量的社交信息，其说明了从各公司获得满意体验的人数的比例，（4）完整的社交信息，其中既包含基于份额的社交信息，又包含基于质量的社交信息。我们研究的一个关键见解是，不同类型的社会信息对公司需求的影响不同。首先，对于服务质量明显更好的公司而言，促进基于质量的社交信息可显着提高市场份额，降低需求变化并加快融合速度。其次，当较高质量的公司仅比其他公司具有边际优势时，仅宣传基于股票的信息将导致较高的市场份额和较低的需求波动性。第三个重要结果是，仅提供一种类型的社会信息实际上比提供完整的社会信息对更高质量的公司更有用。