演讲题目：Are Advice-Takers Bayesian? Preference similarity effects on advice taking

演讲嘉宾：Hang Shen，University of California, Riverside

演讲时间：9月18日（周五）上午9:00-11:00

演讲地点：嘉庚一（保欣丽英楼）207室

主持人： 江玮  助理教授

摘要：

Consumers increasingly depend on online word-of-mouth to inform their purchase decisions. Thanks to the recent socialization of online recommendation platforms, consumers can now receive advice from others who they are least partially familiar with, especially in terms of their preferences, by viewing other users’ profiles and rating histories. We posit that consumers take advice from online “surrogates” at least partially according to how similar the surrogate’s preferences seem to their own. An objective way to assess preference similarity is preference matching, or the degree to which two people both like or dislike the same products or experiences in the past. We show that people make two systematic errors when making affective forecasts about their likelihood of future enjoyment in the presence of preference matching information. Specifically, they tend to underestimate the degree of preference matching with the surrogate, yet overweigh the surrogate’s advice relative to a Bayesian advice-taker. These errors bias affective forecasts in opposing directions, partially offsetting each other and sometimes leading to surprisingly accurate forecasts. These results provide important implications for users of review websites and designers of such websites.

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