Does Social Influence Change with Other Information Sources? A Large-Scale Randomized Experiment in Medical Crowdfunding

We examine how social influence interacts with other information sources to affect user behaviors in the context of medical crowdfunding. We conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment on a leading medical crowdfunding platform, showing friends’ donation information to donors in the treatment group and not showing such information in the control group, and examine how the likelihood to donate differs. In addition, we conduct a survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk to evaluate the informational value of different case attributes in conveying the patients’ need for help to donors. We find that for cases containing attributes with high informational value (e.g., minor patient, severe conditions), social influence is insignificant. In contrast, for cases lacking attributes with high informational value, social influence significantly increases donors’ likelihood to donate. Overall, our results show that the impact of social influence depends on the informational value of other information sources, suggesting that the social influence in our context is primarily informational. Our findings indicate that rather than generating an entrenchment effect, where cases with attributes of high informational value attract disproportionate benefits, social influence can increase donation likelihood to cases that lack such attributes, promoting more equal access to resources overall.