Avoiding the diffusion of responsibility in social networking groups: a field experiment on responses to online help-request referrals
Help-request referral (HRR) campaigns are being increasingly adopted by online service providers to attract online traffic and engage new users. In these campaigns, participants are required to collect a specific amount of help from their social network in exchange for attractive rewards. Participan...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2023
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/169556 |
| _version_ | 1811690069359067136 |
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| author | Feng, Nan Hu, Zhongtao Wu, Yi Choi, Ben |
| author2 | Nanyang Business School |
| author_facet | Nanyang Business School Feng, Nan Hu, Zhongtao Wu, Yi Choi, Ben |
| author_sort | Feng, Nan |
| collection | NTU |
| description | Help-request referral (HRR) campaigns are being increasingly adopted by online service providers to attract online traffic and engage new users. In these campaigns, participants are required to collect a specific amount of help from their social network in exchange for attractive rewards. Participants often face challenges in obtaining positive feedback from their social networking groups due to the diffusion of responsibility. Based on the triangle model of responsibility, this study proposes and empirically tests a research model that examines two key determinants (i.e., request personalization and relational closeness) of recipients’ perceived responsibility that further shape their responses to HRR. Our field experiment empirically supports the research hypotheses. Overall, this study enriches the literature on online social referrals by focusing on HRR, where social referrals are broadcasted and senders reap referral benefits. The study also provides practical insights for HRR designers and social networking service providers. |
| first_indexed | 2024-10-01T05:58:08Z |
| format | Journal Article |
| id | ntu-10356/169556 |
| institution | Nanyang Technological University |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-10-01T05:58:08Z |
| publishDate | 2023 |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | ntu-10356/1695562023-07-27T15:35:30Z Avoiding the diffusion of responsibility in social networking groups: a field experiment on responses to online help-request referrals Feng, Nan Hu, Zhongtao Wu, Yi Choi, Ben Nanyang Business School Business::Information technology Triangle Model of Responsibility Request Personalization Help-request referral (HRR) campaigns are being increasingly adopted by online service providers to attract online traffic and engage new users. In these campaigns, participants are required to collect a specific amount of help from their social network in exchange for attractive rewards. Participants often face challenges in obtaining positive feedback from their social networking groups due to the diffusion of responsibility. Based on the triangle model of responsibility, this study proposes and empirically tests a research model that examines two key determinants (i.e., request personalization and relational closeness) of recipients’ perceived responsibility that further shape their responses to HRR. Our field experiment empirically supports the research hypotheses. Overall, this study enriches the literature on online social referrals by focusing on HRR, where social referrals are broadcasted and senders reap referral benefits. The study also provides practical insights for HRR designers and social networking service providers. Ministry of Education (MOE) Published version The authors also wish to acknowledge the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72231004, 71871155, 71802147, 72172103), the Ministry of Education of Singapore (Grant MOE 2018-T1-002-097), and the Shandong Industrial Internet Innovation and Entrepreneurship Community for financial support. 2023-07-24T06:29:08Z 2023-07-24T06:29:08Z 2023 Journal Article Feng, N., Hu, Z., Wu, Y. & Choi, B. (2023). Avoiding the diffusion of responsibility in social networking groups: a field experiment on responses to online help-request referrals. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 24(2), 430-451. https://dx.doi.org/10.17705/1jais.00781 1536-9323 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/169556 10.17705/1jais.00781 2-s2.0-85152068380 2 24 430 451 en 2018-T1-002-097 Journal of the Association for Information Systems Copyright © 2023 by the Association for Information Systems. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and full citation on the first page. Copyright for components of this work owned by others than the Association for Information Systems must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission and/or fee. Request permission to publish from: AIS Administrative Office, P.O. Box 2712 Atlanta, GA, 30301-2712 Attn: Reprints, or via email from publications@aisnet.org. application/pdf |
| spellingShingle | Business::Information technology Triangle Model of Responsibility Request Personalization Feng, Nan Hu, Zhongtao Wu, Yi Choi, Ben Avoiding the diffusion of responsibility in social networking groups: a field experiment on responses to online help-request referrals |
| title | Avoiding the diffusion of responsibility in social networking groups: a field experiment on responses to online help-request referrals |
| title_full | Avoiding the diffusion of responsibility in social networking groups: a field experiment on responses to online help-request referrals |
| title_fullStr | Avoiding the diffusion of responsibility in social networking groups: a field experiment on responses to online help-request referrals |
| title_full_unstemmed | Avoiding the diffusion of responsibility in social networking groups: a field experiment on responses to online help-request referrals |
| title_short | Avoiding the diffusion of responsibility in social networking groups: a field experiment on responses to online help-request referrals |
| title_sort | avoiding the diffusion of responsibility in social networking groups a field experiment on responses to online help request referrals |
| topic | Business::Information technology Triangle Model of Responsibility Request Personalization |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/169556 |
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