TY - JOUR
T1 - Trust and the strength of ties in online social networks
T2 - An exploratory field experiment
AU - Bapna, Ravi
AU - Gupta, Alok
AU - Rice, Sarah
AU - Sundararajan, Arun
PY - 2017/3
Y1 - 2017/3
N2 - We conduct an exploratory study using a customized Facebook application to understand how social ties are linked to an economic measure of trust. We employ the Investment Game, a well-established economic game designed to generate a quantifiable trust measure. We consider the relationship between observed trust and three "revealed preference" tie strength measures: (1) the degree of interaction between friends on their walls; (2) embeddedness, a metric related to the number of mutual friends shared; and (3) being tagged together in a photograph, indicative of a physical-world interaction. We identify latent heterogeneity among our subjects, establishing that for users with a large number of Facebook friends, the only measure associated with trust is whether the dyad was tagged in a photo together. In contrast, for users that are more selective and have fewer Facebook friends, all three aforementioned tie strength measures correlate with trust. Our findings are preliminary evidence that traditional measures of dyadic trust like embeddedness which are used widely in physical-world social networks may not always be effective predictors of digital trust, because not all online social ties are created equal. Our findings provide preliminary evidence that traditional measures of dyadic trust may not always be effective predictors of trust, as not all online social ies are created equal.
AB - We conduct an exploratory study using a customized Facebook application to understand how social ties are linked to an economic measure of trust. We employ the Investment Game, a well-established economic game designed to generate a quantifiable trust measure. We consider the relationship between observed trust and three "revealed preference" tie strength measures: (1) the degree of interaction between friends on their walls; (2) embeddedness, a metric related to the number of mutual friends shared; and (3) being tagged together in a photograph, indicative of a physical-world interaction. We identify latent heterogeneity among our subjects, establishing that for users with a large number of Facebook friends, the only measure associated with trust is whether the dyad was tagged in a photo together. In contrast, for users that are more selective and have fewer Facebook friends, all three aforementioned tie strength measures correlate with trust. Our findings are preliminary evidence that traditional measures of dyadic trust like embeddedness which are used widely in physical-world social networks may not always be effective predictors of digital trust, because not all online social ties are created equal. Our findings provide preliminary evidence that traditional measures of dyadic trust may not always be effective predictors of trust, as not all online social ies are created equal.
KW - Field study
KW - Investment Game
KW - Switching regression
KW - Trust
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UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85016291352&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.25300/MISQ/2017/41.1.06
DO - 10.25300/MISQ/2017/41.1.06
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85016291352
SN - 0276-7783
VL - 41
SP - 115
EP - 130
JO - MIS Quarterly: Management Information Systems
JF - MIS Quarterly: Management Information Systems
IS - 1
ER -