Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• He, Stephen Xihao

Titel

Consumer judgment and forecasting using online word-of-mouth

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Empowered by information technology, modern consumers increasingly rely upon online word-of-mouth (WOM—e.g., product reviews) to guide their purchase decisions. This dissertation investigates how WOM information is processed by consumers and its downstream consequences. The quality of consumer decisions often depends on accurate forecasting of future enjoyment. Chapter 2 of the dissertation explores the value of specific types of word-of-mouth information (e.g., numeric ratings, text commentary, or both) for making forecast. After proposing an anchoring-and-adjustment framework for the utilization of WOM to inform consumer forecasts, I support this framework with a series of experiments. Results demonstrate that the relative forecasting advantage of different information types is a function of the extent to which consumer and reviewer have similar product-level preferences (‘source-receiver similarity’). Consumers are more likely than ever to encounter a mixture of positive and negative WOM. Chapter 3 of the dissertation investigates the process by which dispersion—the degree to which opinions are divided for a product or service—in WOM is interpreted. Using an attribution-based approach, I argue that the effect of WOM dispersion is dependent on the perceived cause of that dispersion, which is systematically related to perceptions of preference heterogeneity in a product category. For products for which preferences are expected to vary, dispersion is likely to be attributed to the reviewers rather than the product itself, and therefore tolerated. I provide evidence for my proposal in a series of experiments where WOM dispersion is manipulated and respondents make choices and indicate purchase intentions.