Why and When Consumers Prefer Products of User-Driven Firms: A Social Identification Account
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Companies are increasingly drawing on their user communities to generate promising ideas for new products, which are then marketed as “user-designed” products to the broader consumer market. We demonstrate that nonparticipating, observing consumers prefer to buy from user- rather than designer-driven firms because of an enhanced identification with the firm that has adopted this user-driven philosophy. Three experimental studies validate a newly proposed social identification account underlying this effect. Because consumers are also users, their social identities connect to the user-designers, and they feel empowerment by vicariously being involved in the design process. This formed connection leads to preference for the firm’s products. Importantly, this social identification account also effectively predicts when the effect does not materialize. First, we find that if consumers feel dissimilar to participating users, the effects are attenuated. We demonstrate that this happens when the community differs from consumers along important demographics (i.e., gender) or when consumers are nonexperts in the focal domain (i.e., they feel that they do not belong to the social group of participating users). Second, the effects are attenuated if the user-driven firm is only selectively rather than fully open to participation from all users (observing consumers do not feel socially included). These findings advance the emerging theory on user involvement and offer practical implications for firms interested in pursuing a user-driven philosophy. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1999 . This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it