Do Online Service-Pitchers’ Words of Certainty and Rapport-Building Boost Transactional Success?

Abstract

In this study, via a web platform that provides a service-oriented labor market, we examined the communication qualities (certainty- and rapport building-words) of service-pitchers’ online bidding and their accompanying messages in response to job posts that ultimately got contracted during the time period of January 1-December 31, 2010. Focusing our analysis on the 587,547 seller-communications for posted jobs ending in service contracts enabled us to compare, for each contracted project, the communication-qualities of that contract’s selected versus unselected service-pitchers—an impossible comparison to make for job-postings that yielded no contract. Using conditional fixed-effects logistic regression, controlling for service-pitchers’ bidding price and other characteristics, we found that the certainty with which service-pitchers pitch their services is positively associated with being selected by service-seeking buyers up to a threshold, after which online service-pitchers‘ message-certainty harms their contract-acquisitions; and thus, the contract-winning benefits of online service-pitchers’ message-certainty was in the shape of an inverted U-shape, consistent with the “too much of a good thing” (TMGT)-effect. Also as hypothesized, we found that the TMGT- effect of online service-pitchers’ message-certainty was moderated by their extent of rapport-building, such that the online service- pitchers who accompanied words of certainty with more (rather than fewer) rapport-building words tended to be more likely selected and to be less prone to suffering backlash. These two patterns repeated, also as hypothesized, when examining how the message-certainty in selected online service-pitchers’ pitches affected their buyers’ satisfaction with their job-completion. Our findings’ theoretical and practical implications are discussed.