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Consumer-perceived review attitude determines consumer overall information adoption and is a core part of consumer’s online-shopping. This study aims to focus on factors that could influence consumer review attitude and can be used by marketers to shape individual information perception.

The study used the questionnaire method to collect data from online shoppers and the modelling of structural equations as an empirical approach to analyse the data.

The findings demonstrate that both systematic and heuristic cues impact the reviewer’s credibility and perceived website attitude differently, which, in turn, influence review attitude. Review characteristics, such as factuality, consistency and relevancy, have a positive relationship with reviewer credibility, while only review consistency and relevancy appears to have a relationship with review attitude. Website characteristics such as reputation, familiarity and social interactivity positively influence the website attitude, which positively influences review attitude. Apart from this, review skepticism has a significant negative relationship with review attitude.

This study could help to foster a positive attitude towards online reviews. Digital marketers need to motivate trusted reviewers to post consistent, fact-based reviews. Further improving the overall website reputation and interactivity could bring a positive attitude towards the reviews. Also, digital marketers must filter and avoid contradictory reviews or reviews that have a bipolar message and reviews expressing numerous emotions to enhance review relevance and consistency.

The current study addresses the need to understand the formation of consumer review attitude through both review and website characteristics using heuristic – systematic model. The paper captures the complex process undergone by the consumer to decipher review attitude and thereby extend the understanding of consumer information processing.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the protection motivation theory’s (PMT) maladaptive coping response to anti-Covid-19 preventive persuasive appeals. PMT is based on coping appraisal that may lead to either an adaptive- or a maladaptive coping response. It has been suggested that the maladaptive coping response is not sufficiently investigated and can be represented by individuals’ resistance to anti-Covid-19 persuasive messages. It has been also supposed that resistance is predicted and modeled through a set of cognitive, affective and individual factors such as information processing style, fear arousal, gender and coping self-efficacy.

An experiment and a survey were conducted online on a random sample of 290 individuals. The sample was divided into two groups, each of which was exposed to an anti-Covid-19 persuasive message.

The findings show that resistance to anti-Covid-19 persuasion is not directly predicted by the individual’s exposure to the message, but channeled through an affective and a cognitive process. It was also reported that resistance is predicted by both the reflective and the nonreflective information processing styles, which are in turn predicted by a high versus a low fear arousal. Fear arousal level was shown to be moderated by gender and coping self-efficacy.

This research brings additional insight to the PMT in so far that it highlights the maladaptive coping response through resistance to persuasion in a pandemic context.

This paper aims to clarify the effect of attitudinal ambivalence on resistance to anti-smoking persuasion through information processing styles. It was hypothesized that a high smoker’s ambivalence, induced by an anti-smoking persuasive message, triggers among smokers both a reflective and a non-reflective information processing. In turn, both the information processing styles were supposed to be predictors of the resistance to anti-smoking persuasion.

An experiment and a survey were conducted on a random sample of 347 smokers in this regard.

The findings indicated that smokers feel ambivalent toward anti-smoking messages in print ads and tend to process them both analytically and superficially. Also, it seems that only the analytical processing triggers resistance to anti-smoking persuasion.

The author reports on the importance of attitudinal ambivalence and information processing in the resistance to anti-smoking persuasion process. The paper should be of interest to readers in the areas of health communication and social marketing. This work seems to be important to the extent that few works have highlighted the causal and linear effect of a persuasive anti-smoking message on smokers’ ambivalence, information processing and resistance to persuasion. The findings in this paper seem interesting insofar, as they show the importance of the negative emotional appeal in the ambivalence, analytical information processing and resistance triggering.

Phishing remains a major cybersecurity problem. Mainly adopting variance approaches, researchers have suggested several recommendations to help users avoid being victimized in phishing attacks. However, the evidence suggests that anti-phishing recommendations are not very effective. The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to analyze why the existing anti-phishing recommendations may not be very effective; second, to propose stage theorizing as an additional approach for studying phishing that can contribute toward more effective recommendations; and third, to demonstrate using a stage theory, how IS researchers can utilize the concept of stages in phishing research.

The study draws on findings from previous empirical phishing research to assess whether the reasons why people are victimized in phishing attacks can be categorized into stages. The criteria for stages of the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) are used as an example.

Analysis indicates support for the existence of stages of phishing victims. The criteria for stages of the TTM were applied to the reasons that subjects in previous studies gave for clicking on phishing links and to the anti-phishing recommendations proposed in previous studies. There was overall support for four of the five criteria of the TTM. The results from the current study indicate that a targeted approach is a better approach to proposing anti-phishing recommendations.

The analysis identified the stages of phishing victims and the processes of change for each stage. It is suggested that recommendations against phishing should target individuals based on their resident stages. Moreover, the processes of change should be applied to the correct stage for the recommendations to be effective.

From a phishing perspective, there is a lack of research based on stage theorizing. The current study presents stage theorizing as an additional approach to the existing approaches and demonstrates how a stage theory can be used to make more effective recommendations against phishing. The study has thrown light on the benefits of stage theorizing and how its approach to targeted recommendations can be useful in IS security research.

The helpfulness vote is a type of aggregate user representation that, by measuring the quality of an online review based on certain criteria, can allow readers to find helpful reviews more quickly. Although widely applied in practice, the effectiveness of the voting mechanism is unsatisfactory. This paper uses the heuristic–systematic model and the theory of dynamics of reviews to shed light on the effect of various information cues (product ratings, word count and product attributes in the textual content of reviews) on online reviews’ aggregative voting process. It proposes a conceptual model of seven empirically tested hypotheses.

A dataset of user-generated online hotel reviews (n = 6,099) was automatically extracted from Ctrip.com. In order to measure the variable of product attributes as a systematic cue, the paper uses Chinese word segmentation, a part-of-speech tag and word frequency statistics to analyze online textual content. To verify the seven hypotheses, SPSS 17.0 was used to perform multiple linear regression.

The results show that the aggregative process of helpfulness voting can be divided into two stages, initial and cumulative voting, depending on whether voting is affected by the previous votes. Heuristic (product ratings, word count) and systematic cues (product attributes in the textual content) respectively exert a greater impact on the two stages. Furthermore, the interaction of heuristic and systematic cues plays an important role in both stages, with a stronger impact on the cumulative voting stage and a weaker one on the initial stage.

This paper’s findings can be used to explore improvements to helpfulness voting by aligning it with an individual’s information process strategy, such as by providing more explicating heuristic cues, developing different methods of presenting relevant cues to promote the voting decision at different stages, and specifying the cognitive mechanisms when designing the functions and features of helpfulness voting.

This study explores the aggregative process of helpfulness votes, drawing on the study of the dynamics of online reviews for the first time. It also contributes to the understanding of the influence of various information cues on the process from an information process perspective.

Luxury consumption has evolved, and two important reasons behind the change include globalization and the COVID-19 crisis. These factors have led to the rise of new luxury consumption, which is different from traditional luxury consumption. This study examines how consumers’ identities shape their intentions to consume traditional luxury and new luxury brands.

The theoretical underpinnings of the schema congruity theory and heuristic systematic framework were applied to understand the role of identities in determining consumers’ regulatory focus, price luxuriousness inference and preference for traditional and new luxury brands.

Findings suggest that the global identity of consumers shapes their promotion focus and price luxuriousness inferences. However, their local identities induce a prevention goal. Consumers with such a goal are unlikely to make price luxuriousness inferences. Further, these inferences lead to the choice of traditional luxury over new luxury brands. The results also establish the moderating effects of consumer flexibility.

The extant literature is inconclusive on the role of globalization in luxury consumption and ignores new luxury brands. The current study shows the impact of identities and regulatory focus on traditional and new luxury consumption. The findings also indicate consumers’ regulatory focus and price luxuriousness inference as the reasons behind the influence. The paper also implies that consumers open to renting, sharing or buying second-hand goods will prefer new luxury over traditional luxury brands.

This study examined how people assess health information from AI and improve their diagnostic ability to identify health misinformation. The proposed model was designed to test a cognitive heuristic theory in misinformation discernment.

We proposed the heuristic-systematic model to assess health misinformation processing in the algorithmic context. Using the Analysis of Moment Structure (AMOS) 26 software, we tested fairness/transparency/accountability (FAccT) as constructs that influence the heuristic evaluation and systematic discernment of misinformation by users. To test moderating and mediating effects, PROCESS Macro Model 4 was used.

The effect of AI-generated misinformation on people’s perceptions of the veracity of health information may differ according to whether they process misinformation heuristically or systematically. Heuristic processing is significantly associated with the diagnosticity of misinformation. There is a greater chance that misinformation will be correctly diagnosed and checked, if misinformation aligns with users’ heuristics or is validated by the diagnosticity they perceive.

When exposed to misinformation through algorithmic recommendations, users’ perceived diagnosticity of misinformation can be predicted accurately from their understanding of normative values. This perceived diagnosticity would then positively influence the accuracy and credibility of the misinformation.

Perceived diagnosticity exerts a key role in fostering misinformation literacy, implying that improving people’s perceptions of misinformation and AI features is an efficient way to change their misinformation behavior.

Although there is broad agreement on the need to control and combat health misinformation, the magnitude of this problem remains unknown. It is essential to understand both users’ cognitive processes when it comes to identifying health misinformation and the diffusion mechanism from which such misinformation is framed and subsequently spread.

The mechanisms through which users process and spread misinformation have remained open-ended questions. This study provides theoretical insights and relevant recommendations that can make users and firms/institutions alike more resilient in protecting themselves from the detrimental impact of misinformation.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-04-2023-0167

This research aims to investigate the moderating impact of product shadows in gestalt versus component product frames on ad effectiveness perceptions. It offers insights on shadow-compatible and incompatible modes of product presentation color as well as consumer visual processing modes that offer optimal advertising effectiveness.

This research begins with a content analysis of some popular print magazines and builds on qualitative findings from interviews conducted with two industry executives. It then undertakes four experiments to test the proposed hypotheses following a more deductive approach.

Results reveal that incorporating product shadows increase ad effectiveness for gestalt products presented in black-and-white, but lower ad effectiveness for component products presented in color. Additionally, ad effectiveness for a gestalt (component) product presented in black-and-white (color) increases (decreases) in the presence of product shadow when consumers are currently processing in a compatible, gestalt (component) visual mode.

In addition to extending the limited marketing research on product shadows, this research contributes to the literature studying information communication theory (ICT) and advertising effectiveness, Construal-Level Theory (CLT), Heuristic–Systematic Model (HSM) of information processing and stylistic visual cues used in advertising.

This research is focused on advertising effectiveness, providing a tangible outcome of interest to practitioners. An optimal use of this simple, inexpensive and stylistic ad element can help managers design effective communications without forgoing established brand equity.

Limited marketing research on product shadows has only looked at their impact on product luxury implications (Sharma, 2016), experiential versus functional brand evaluations (Sharma, 2018) and product heaviness perceptions (Sharma and Romero, 2020). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first to investigate specific gestalt versus component product contexts and the role of black-and-white and colored product presentations, along with specific consumer visual processing modes where shadows either increase or decrease the overall ad effectiveness.

This study aims to offer a conceptual framework that elaborates on how tourists’ perception of contradictory features in reviews’ factuality and comprehension – within a single hotel review and across multiple hotel reviews – trigger attitude ambivalence and psychological discomfort, which determine their behaviors – choice deferral and hotel booking intentions. It also investigates the moderating role of anticipated conflicting reactions (ACRs) through contradictory features on consumers’ attitude ambivalence.

Using a Chinese setting, researchers collected data from 524 inbound tourists who were the consumers of hotels in Beijing. The study used IBM Amos 23.0 to test measurement and structural models for the proposed relationships. It also used PROCESS macro 3.4 for the moderation analysis.

The findings reveal a positive association between contradictory features in reviews and the resulting ambivalence that affects consumers’ discomfort and leads to the decision to defer the choice of hotel. Conversely, consumers’ discomfort has a positive impact on the hotel booking intentions. ACRs have positive moderating effects on the associations between contradictory features and consumers’ attitude ambivalence.

By investigating the contradictory features in hotel reviews, this study extends the body of research on dual information processing (i.e. the heuristic–systematic model) and the literature on service management, psychological behaviors, travel intermediaries and hotel firms. Future research directions are recommended for tourism and hospitality researchers.

This study examines the dynamic relationships of visit behavior in the multiple channels [personal computer (PC) and mobile channels] on online store sales performance.

The empirical data were from an online store for the period between August 14, 2015 and May 15, 2016. The data consisted of consumer visit behavior and online store sales performance. Vector autoregression with an exogenous variables model was adopted to investigate the dynamic relationships.

The empirical results show significant relationships between visit behavior metrics (number of visitors, average number of visits per visitor and average length of each visit) in the two channels and online store sales performance. The number of visitors through the PC and mobile channels strongly and positively affects online store sales performance both in the short term and in the longer term. Moreover, the number of visitors in the PC channel has the strongest influence on sales performance metrics, followed by the number of visitors and the average number of visits in the mobile channel. The PC channel's visit behavior metrics explain a larger proportion of the sales performance variance than that in the mobile channel.

The previous literature on consumer behavior in multichannel marketing mainly focuses on channel selection or migration, and examines the different factors affecting channel choice behavior. Little is known about the impacts of visit behavior in the multiple channels. This study adopts the heuristic-systematic information processing theory to unveil the impacts of visit behavior metrics in the PC and mobile channels on online store sales performance.