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| Type | Master's Thesis |
| Scope | Discipline-based scholarship |
| Title | Contexts that affect opinion leadership: a literature review and an experimental test under risk and uncertainty |
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| Institution | University of Zurich |
| Faculty | Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics |
| Number of Pages | 109 |
| Date | 2017 |
| Abstract Text | Opinion leaders (OLs), or influencers, have been studied extensively since the concept was created in 1944. The boost in modern technology and the constant flux of people’s values and beliefs provide exciting new opportunities as well as challenges for researchers and managers in understanding how situations and contexts change the way people perceive social influence, and hence to optimise information or product diffusion process. Recognising the diversity of contexts and its importance to social influence perceptions, we’ve firstly tried to build up a comprehensive system that helps people identify and understand contexts, and subsequently find the most appropriate targets to promote behavioural change in either research or marketing activities. Through the extensive literature review on contextual influence, we’ve noticed social influence under uncertain circumstances to be an understudied topic. Therefore we’ve carefully designed a laboratory experiment intending to find out the answer to the question: are OLs still as influential in uncertain situations? We compare OLs to another very important type of influencer - peers - and have constructed a novel hypothesis that, when there’s not much risk, people do tend to follow the OL’s advocates; conversely, in ambiguous circumstances, peers are more influential than “opinion leaders”, even when the peer opinion comes from an anonymous aggregation of people who do not even share personal relationships with the decision maker. In our prior-to-experiment test we were able to prove the former part of this claim, and our lab experiment is designed to testify the latter. With sufficient resources, we should also be able to find out the extent to which different levels of risk and uncertainty affect the strength of peer and OL influence. |
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