Information Usefulness and Attitude Formation a Double-Dependent Variable Model (DDV) to Examine the Impacts of Online Reviews on Consumers

Jinting Lu,Haiqing Bai

doi:10.4018/joeuc.20211101.oa29

Abstract

With the popularity of online shopping, a large body of studies have paid much attention to the factors influencing consumers’ information seeking and assessing. However, theoretical development and empirical testing are still not enough to explain this phenomenon, that is, during the information seeking and assessing process, what factor play a decisive role is a question needed to be deeply explored. This study, thus, aim to understand the impact of the attributes of online reviews on consumer. In addition, we find that review volume (RV: a heuristic factor) have direct impacts on perceived usefulness (PU) and attitudes (ATT), while source credibility (SC: another heuristic factor) only influences the perceived usefulness (PU), but no effects on attitudes (ATT). As for the moderating effects, perceived social-psychological risk (PSR) moderates the effects of both reviews volume (RV) and source credibility (SC) on perceived usefulness and attitudes. We explored the reasons underlying those findings , and also discuss implications for both researchers and practitioners.

Highlights

With the popularity of online shopping, a large body of studies have paid much attention to the factors influencing consumer information seeking and assessing
Attitudes are not influenced by source credibility, because one’s attitudes is relatively stable, especially under a context of quick information seeking and assessing process. Another reason why source credibility didn’t have significant effects on attitudes, may be that there are both true users’ review and merchants’ review online, which represents the stance of providers, not the true opinions of true consumers, readers, especially those experienced users, Figure 3
Could distinguish them and are unlikely to accept them, because they do not want to be wrong guided, since there are studies confirmed that people do not believe the content of online reviews provided by merchants, such as Hussain et al (2017) suggest that, compared to the comments from any company expert, the comments of previous consumers are more persuasive on the website

Summary

Introduction

With the popularity of online shopping, a large body of studies have paid much attention to the factors influencing consumer information seeking and assessing. Theoretical development and empirical testing are still not enough to explain this phenomenon; that is, during the information seeking and assessing process, what factors play a decisive role is a question needed to be deeply explored? The authors find that review volume (RV: a heuristic factor) has a direct impact on perceived usefulness (PU) and attitudes (ATT), while source credibility (SC: another heuristic factor) only influences the perceived usefulness (PU) but has no effect on attitudes (ATT). As for the moderating effects, perceived social-psychological risk (PSR) moderates the effects of both review volume (RV) and source credibility (SC) on perceived usefulness and attitudes. This study adopts a comprehensive approach and theories to analyze the online reviews’ effects on consumer, proposes and empirically tests a comprehensive double dependent variable-DDV model, and presents some managerial and theoretical implications

Methods

Results

Conclusion