How Does Popularity Information Affect Choices? A Field Experiment

Popularity information is usually thought to reinforce existing sales trends by encouraging customers to flock to mainstream products with broad appeal. We suggest a countervailing market force: popularity information may benefit niche products with narrow appeal disproportionately, because the same level of popularity implies higher quality for narrow‐appeal products than for broad‐appeal products. We examine this hypothesis empirically using field experiment data from a website that lists wedding service vendors. Our findings are consistent with this hypothesis: narrow‐appeal vendors receive more visits than equally popular broad‐appeal vendors after the introduction of popularity information.