Social Contagion of Gift Exchange in Online Groups
Year: 2019
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Does receiving a gift encourage the recipient to send more gifts? Causalidentification of behavioral contagion is very challenging, especially based on
observational data from social networks. Given that the online monetary gift
(also known as a packet) in WeChat groups is randomly split between group
members, we are able to conduct a natural experiment to identify the causal
effect of receiving online red packets on the contagion of gift exchange.
Analyzing gifting behavior using a large-scale dataset of 3.4 million WeChat
users, we find that recipients on average repay 18.29% of the amount they
receive. Moreover, our analysis shows that recipients' contagion may be driven
by different types of reciprocity. We further find that the draw
recipients repay 1.5 times more than other recipients, and identify a group
norm that luckiest draw recipients should send payment back to the group.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2969101061