When Popularity Meets Position: Disentangling Popularity and Position Using an Experimental Approach

Department of Decision Sciences and Managerial Economics

Prior studies have shown that popularity information has a great impact on an individual’s search or choice process. However, one thing that has been largely overlooked in this literature is the influence of position. The effect of popularity could be potentially overestimated if we do not account for position. In this paper, we try to fill in the gap in literature through conducting laboratory experiments. Our results suggest that compared with a situation where no popularity information is presented, people tend to search in more strictly sequential way when popularity information is aligned with position and search in a more loosely sequential way when popularity is not aligned with position. When examining the relative influence of popularity and position, we find that position effect has a stronger impact than popularity effect for the search stage. However, neither popularity nor position has an effect on consumer choice decision conditional on the search. Our study is among the first to understand the interplay between popularity and position effect, and their relative impact on the consumer’s two-stage decision process. We discuss implications for theory and practice.