Reto Hofstetter - room A14 - 13:30-15:00
Institute of Marketing and Communication Management
Start date: 7 March 2013
End date: 8 March 2013
Harnessing Tacit Knowledge in Social Networks: A Social Approach to Incentivize Truth-Telling
Reto Hofstetter, USI Università della Svizzera italiana
Christian Hildebrand, University of St. Gallen
Andreas Herrmann, University of St. Gallen
Joel Huber, Duke University
We propose a novel approach utilizing the information among friends in social networks that provides incentives for truthful responding in consumer surveys. In this approach, respondents answer survey questions in the context of a pure coordination game. In a series of studies, we show that the coordination game setting induces greater truth-telling by having respondents being rewarded if their answers agree with friends' predictions. The amount of improvement depends on the observability of the surveyed behavior, the tendency of the respondent to self-disclose, and the closeness of the friend.
