Beyond Social Influence: Examining the Efficacy of Non-Social Recommendations

This paper examines the effectiveness of social recommendations that rely on providing descriptive social information, compared to random recommendations, in terms of changing behavior. To this end, we collected choices made by Deciders under three (Study 1) or two (Study 2) recommendation-source treatments and a no-recommendation baseline. After role assignment (Decider or Receiver), Deciders were presented with 12 choice problems, each requiring them to decide between two options (A and B) that either impacted the points they could earn for themselves or the points that could be earned by themselves and/or by one or two Receivers. At the end of the experiment, points were translated into monetary earnings for one randomly selected choice problem.