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The authors designed and ran an experiment to measure social influence in online recommender systems, specifically, how often people’s choices are changed by others’ recommendations when facing different levels of confirmation and conformity pressures. In this experiment, participants were first asked to provide their preference from pairs of items. They were then asked to make second choices about the same pairs with knowledge of other people’s preferences. The results show that other people’s opinions significantly sway people’s own choices. The influence is stronger when people are required to make their second decision sometime later (22.4%) rather than immediately (14.1%). Moreover, people seem to be most likely to reverse their choices when facing a moderate, as opposed to large, number of opposing opinions. Finally, the time people spend making the first decision significantly predicts whether they will reverse their decisions later on, whereas demographics such as age and gender do not. These results have implications for consumer behavior research as well as online marketing strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We analyzed the temporal aspect of trends and trend-setters in Sina Weibo, contrasting it with earlier observations of Twitter. We found a vast difference in the content shared in China as compared with a global social network such as Twitter. In China, the trends are created almost entirely due to the retweets of media content such as jokes, images, and videos, unlike Twitter where trends have more to do with current global events and news stories. On closer inspection, we observed that most trends in Sina Weibo are due to the continuous retweets of a small percentage of fraudulent accounts, set up to artificially inflate certain posts. This reveals evidence of an "Internet Water Army," a unique promotional method deployed by public relations companies in China to influence the popular dissemination of information in online social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]