An Assessment of Contagion on Social Networking Sites

ocial network influence has been recognized as an important determinant for consumer behaviour. Through a web-based survey using restaurant consumption as a research context, this study explores social influence resulting from two distinct social reference processes: communication and comparison. The relationship between social interactions and social influence is moderated by opinion leadership and attitude towards status consumption, which are conceptualized to represent consumers’ competitiveness. Consumers’ status consumption contributes negatively to recommendation-based consumption, but positively to competitionbased consumption. In other words, the more competitive the consumers are, the less they tend to follow others’ recommendation, the more they consume products and services to establish or maintain their status in the social network. Several managerial implications are provided.