Interactive effects of advising strength and brand familiarity on users' trust and distrust in online recommendation agents
Information Technology & People
ISSN: 0959-3845
Article publication date: 24 May 2021
Issue publication date: 18 November 2021
Abstract
Purpose
This paper investigates the effects of advising strength of a recommendation agent on users' trust and distrust beliefs and how the effects are moderated by perceived brand familiarity.
Design/methodology/approach
A research model is evaluated using a laboratory experiment with 149 participants.
Findings
Results reveal that a strong advising tone leads to higher trust in terms of users' credibility and benevolence beliefs and lower distrust in terms of their discredibility beliefs (the trustor's concerns regarding the trustee's dishonesty and competence in engaging in harmful behavior) when perceived brand familiarity is high. By contrast, when brand familiarity is low, strong advising tone results in low trust in terms of users' credibility belief and high distrust in terms of their beliefs in discredibility and malevolence (concerns regarding the trustee's conduct in terms of a malicious intention that can hurt the trustor's welfare).
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the trust and distrust literature by studying how each of the dimensions of trust and distrust can be affected by an RA's design feature. It extends the attribution theory to the RA context by studying the moderating role of brand familiarity in determining the effects of the advising strength of an RA. It provides actionable guidelines for practitioners regarding the adoption of an RA's appropriate advising strength to promote different types of products.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the senior editor (Dr. Zhongyun Zhou) and the two anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments and constructive feedback that have significantly improved the quality of the paper. The work described in the paper was partially supported by grants from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong S.A.R. (Project No. CityU 150310), the Strategic Research Grants of the City University of Hong Kong (Projects No. 7005380 & 7005193), the Digital Innovation Laboratory of Department of Information Systems at the City University of Hong Kong, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 71902193), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Project No. 2019M653258).
Citation
Liu, T., Wang, W., Xu, J.(D)., Ding, D. and Deng, H. (2021), "Interactive effects of advising strength and brand familiarity on users' trust and distrust in online recommendation agents", Information Technology & People, Vol. 34 No. 7, pp. 1920-1948. https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-08-2019-0448
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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