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Although family socialization is a rich field in consumer behavior, to date no research has been done to disaggregate family influences on behavior into separate parent and sibling components. Here we use triadic analysis (parent and two siblings) to explore the influence of family on consumer innovativeness. We develop hypotheses that postulate parental influence, and, based on conflicting views of sibling similarity in the recent behavioral genetics and developmental psychology literature, set competing hypotheses about sibling influence on innovativeness and innovative behavior. Using a model tested with triads from 137 families, we find that both parents and siblings influence innovativeness, but that parental influence is stronger than sibling influence. We discuss the implications of our work for the study of family influence in consumer behavior.

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The authors find that a consumer's position in a social network is related to both opinion leadership and susceptibility to influence. Using two field network studies, the authors show that people see themselves as opinion leaders when they perceive that they are popular (i.e., central) in the network. However, these self-assessments are sometimes at odds with the perceptions of the rest of the network. Counter-intuitively, the authors demonstrate that consumers who are central in networks are quite susceptible to others' influences. The findings extend the field's knowledge by demonstrating how network centrality is associated with consumer influence.

No abstract