Personal Inquiry and Social Recommendation: Online Word-of-Mouth Generation for Service Retailers on Daily Deal Sites

In this study we investigate how product (service) features and terms of transaction affect two very different word-of-mouth (WOM) activities: personal inquiry and social plugin clicks (SPC). Personal inquiry used to be mainly between seller and the buyers in the past, but in the recent years it can be shared by any potential buyers due to technological changes. Thus we consider this an important type of WOM. The empirical setting is a daily deal site where small offline service businesses can readily promote and sell their services in the form of a voucher. We show that the riskiness of the deal discourages social sharing, because the users do not want to bear the social risk of recommending a deal that might not realize or has little value. Meanwhile, high risk factors seem to increase the intrigue of the deal for personal consumption; personal inquiries increase with higher minimum quantity and higher price.