Digital Nudging for Online Social Sharing: Evidence from A Randomized Field Experiment

This study investigates the effectiveness of digital nudging for users’ social sharing of online platform content. In collaboration with a leading career and education online platform, we conducted a large-scale randomized experiment of digital nudging using website popups. Grounding on the Social Capital Theory and the individual motivation mechanism, we proposed and tested four kinds of nudging messages: simple request, monetary incentive, relational capital, and cognitive capital. We find that nudging messages with monetary incentive, relational and cognitive capital framings lead to increase in social sharing behavior, while nudging message with simple request decreases social sharing, comparing to the control group without nudging. This study contributes to the prior research on digital nudging by providing causal evidence of effective nudging for online social sharing behavior. The findings of this study also provide valuable guidelines for the optimal design of online platforms to effectively nudge/encourage social sharing in practice.