Does reliable information matter? Towards a trustworthy co-created recommendation model by mining unboxing reviews

Abstract

Online review forums provide customers with powerful platforms to express opinions and influence business trends, while allowing firms to collaborate and co-create value with customers. However, information overload due to the huge amount of reviews posted daily complicates the efforts of consumers to locate reliable information when making a purchase decision. Therefore, this study develops a trustworthy co-created recommendation model. The proposed model mines unboxing reviews, calculates the trust scores of the reviewers, and then generates the recommended products by combing this information with customer preferences using a multi-criteria decision-making method. An illustrative example of mobile phones demonstrates the recommendation procedure of the proposed model. The proposed model is evaluated via an empirical experiment to examine the satisfaction of study participants by using a seven-point Likert scale. An analysis of the structural equation modelling results indicates that three factors (i.e. confidence in decision quality, enhanced problem-solving ability, and satisfaction with resource expenditure) significantly and positively affect the purchase decision-making process. Moreover, the proposed model outperforms a baseline model in all four factors, ultimately increasing user satisfaction. In addition to its theoretical framework for co-creating value with customers to develop a trustworthy co-created recommendation model, as supported by various theories of trust, the proposed model provides further insights into the role of customer reviews in designing recommendation models, as well as the extent to which such models impact user decisions.