Emaad Manzoor, George H. Chen, Dokyun Lee, Michael D. Smith
arXiv 1 Jun 2020 · Econometrics · publishedManagement Science (2023) · 8 citations (OpenAlex)
arXiv:2006.00707 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
Deliberation among individuals online plays a key role in shaping the opinions that drive votes, purchases, donations and other critical offline behavior. Yet, the determinants of opinion-change via persuasion in deliberation online remain largely unexplored. Our research examines the persuasive power of $ethos$ -- an individual's "reputation" -- using a 7-year panel of over a million debates from an argumentation platform containing explicit indicators of successful persuasion. We identify the causal effect of reputation on persuasion by constructing an instrument for reputation from a measure of past debate competition, and by controlling for unstructured argument text using neural models of language in the double machine-learning framework. We find that an individual's reputation significantly impacts their persuasion rate above and beyond the validity, strength and presentation of their arguments. In our setting, we find that having 10 additional reputation points causes a 31% increase in the probability of successful persuasion over the platform average. We also find that the impact of reputation is moderated by characteristics of the argument content, in a manner consistent with a theoretical model that attributes the persuasive power of reputation to heuristic information-processing under cognitive overload. We discuss managerial implications for platforms that facilitate deliberative decision-making for public and private organizations online.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bilancini, Ennio, Boncinelli, Leonardo (2018) Rational attitude change by reference cues when information elaboration requires effort | 1.000 | 6 | 4 | 100% |
| 2 | Chaiken, Shelly (1989) Heuristic and systematic information processing within and beyond the persuasion context | 0.928 | 4 | 3 | 100% |
| 3 | Conley, Timothy G, Hansen, Christian B, Rossi, Peter E (2012) Plausibly exogenous | 0.928 | 4 | 3 | 100% |
| 4 | Chernozhukov, Victor, Chetverikov, Denis, Demirer, Mert, Duflo, Esth… (2018) Double/debiased machine learning for treatment and structural parameters | 0.874 | 6 | 2 | 100% |
| 5 | Farrell, Max H, Liang, Tengyuan, Misra, Sanjog (2018) Deep Neural Networks for Estimation and Inference | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 6 | Imbens, Guido, Angrist, Joshua (1994) Identification and estimation of local average treatment effects | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 7 | Petty, Richard E, Cacioppo, John T (1986) The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 8 | Fishkin, James S, Luskin, Robert C (2005) Experimenting with a democratic ideal: Deliberative polling and public opinion | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 9 | Frisch, Ragnar, Waugh, Frederick V (1933) Partial time regressions as compared with individual trends | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 10 | Gentzkow, Matthew, Kelly, Bryan, Taddy, Matt (2019) Text as data | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
Showing the top 10 of 91 scored citations.