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The study investigates how the congruence of online deal popularity and star rating influences service quality expectation in online group buying (OGB) websites. It also investigates the role of authenticity perceptions of online cues.

Two experiments are used to assess the effects of congruence between deal popularity and star rating on service quality expectation for service deals in an OGB website.

The findings suggest that a combination of congruently high deal popularity and high star rating has a stronger effect on expected service quality than a combination of congruently low cues. The findings further suggest that expected service quality is greater under the combination of high deal popularity and low star rating than the combination of low deal popularity and high star rating, showing the differences between incongruent cue combinations. The findings also show the moderating effect of consumer authenticity perceptions of cues on the expected service quality.

The novel contribution of the study is to extend cue congruence theory to explain how congruent online information cues and the consumers' authenticity perceptions of the cues influence consumers' judgment of online deals. The contribution is validated empirically in the context of OGB. The findings advance current knowledge concerning how consumers use online information cues.

This study aims to address a novel information sharing phenomenon among many hospitality consumers, that is, sharing information during, rather than weeks after, a hospitality consumption experience. Specifically, this study tests if including a temporal contiguity cue in a review can significantly enhance the purchase intention of other consumers toward the reviewed business.

A 2 (personal sense of power) × 2 (temporal contiguity cue: manipulated to be absent vs present) quasi-experiment was conducted in this research. Floodlight analysis with the Johnson–Neyman technique was used to test the interaction effect. Hayes’ PROCESS procedure was used to test the mediation effects.

The study found that, for powerless consumers, temporal contiguity cue can effectively enhance the perceived trustworthiness of the review and purchase intention toward the reviewed business. Conversely, for powerful consumers, temporal contiguity cue can significantly reduce the perceived trustworthiness of the review and purchase intention toward the business. Mediation test further revealed evidence for the underlying psychological mechanism for these effects.

Revealing the mixed effects of a novel factor, temporal contiguity cue, on consumer responses toward online hospitality reviews, the current research contributes to the expanding stream of theoretical and managerial knowledge on online review management in social media platforms.

Contextual cues have become a hot research topic in the field of mobile consumer behavior, owing to the continuous rise of digital marketing. However, the complex online shopping scene makes it challenging to directly identify the association between the characteristics of contextual cues and consumer behavior. Presently, few studies have only systematically extracted and refined the types and characteristics of contextual cues. The purpose of this study is to explore the types and mechanisms of contextual cues in online shopping scenarios.

This study uses the word2vec algorithm, grounded theory and co-occurrence cluster method, along with online shopping word-of-mouth (WOM) text and consumer behavior theory, in order to explore different types of contextual cues and its efficiency from 5,619 comment corpus.

This study puts forward the following conclusions. (1) From the perspective of online shopping, contextual cues comprise aesthetic perception cues, value perception cues, trust-dependent cues, time perception cues, memory attention cues, spatial perception cues, attribute cues and relationship cues. (2) Based on the online shopping scenarios, contextual cues and their interaction effects exert an effect on consumer satisfaction, recommendation, purchase and return behavior.

The study conclusions are helpful to further reveal the deep association between contextual cues and consumer behavior in the process of online shopping, thus providing practical and theoretical enlightenment for enterprises to not only effectively reshape the scene but also promote the consumers' active purchase behavior.

This paper aims to explore online consumers’ perceptions of a trustworthy Web site. Specifically, it analyzes which Web site elements and features online buyers identify as online trust cues signaling e-vendor’s trustworthiness.

This study implemented a repertory grid technique to gain insight into the customers’ perceptions of Web site trustworthiness.

The most frequently identified online trust cues belong to the “Layout”, “Easy to Use” and “Sales” categories. This is in contrast with the traditional views that Web elements related to customers’ privacy and security are leading trust cues. In addition, online shoppers confirmed two trends in e-commerce: the role of social media in developing online trust to e-vendors is increasing and online shopping is associated with entertainment.

Rich data collected from 16 participants of this qualitative study present a challenge for generalizability. A caution should be taken in extending findings to the whole population of online shoppers.

This study proves that the repertory grid technique is a useful method for qualitative market research. This method helped to solicit a list of Web site elements and features that online consumers identified as online trust cues. As buyers refer to those cues when deciding to trust or not to trust an e-vendor with the private and confidential information, businesses could use these research findings in designing Web sites that signal trustworthiness to customers.

This study contributes to the research methodology as it extends the use of the repertory grid technique to the study of online trust cues and collection of data online. It is one of a few qualitative studies of online trust cues.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how geographic cues embedded in a website affect Chinese consumers’ cross-border shopping experiences. The study simultaneously explores the effect of telepresence on shoppers’ perceptions of product authenticity and their trust in retailers, key drivers of behavioral intentions.

Two experimental conditions were utilized. Geographic cues depicted a famous shopping district in the retailer’s country (South Korea) or the shopper’s country (China). Study participants were female Chinese consumers in their 20s and 30s who had purchased Korean fashion products in the past (n=236). Structural equation modeling was conducted using AMOS 21.0.

Results indicate that participants in the “retailer’s country” experimental condition experienced higher telepresence and greater perceptions of product authenticity. Furthermore, telepresence increased participants’ trust in the retailer and perceived product authenticity, which led to positive behavioral intentions.

Findings offer important implications for cross-border online retailing. First, results suggest a highly successful tactic for enhancing shoppers’ perceptions of product authenticity and retailer trust on a cross-border platform. Second, cross-border online business professionals should focus on the role of telepresence. Finally, this study provides insight about Chinese cross-border shoppers.

This study contributes to the literature on cross-border online shopping. It suggests that the strategic use of geographic cues on a website can provide an experiential benefit, telepresence, to cross-border shoppers. The study’s findings provide a novel insight into possible unique success factors in cross-border e-commerce.

To provide human judgment input for computer algorithm development, this study examines the relative importance of source, content, and style cues in predicting the truthfulness ratings of two common types of online health information: news stories and institutional news releases.

This study employed a multi-method approach using (1) a manual content analysis of 400 randomly selected online health news stories and news releases from HealthNewsReview.org and (2) an online experiment comparing truthfulness ratings between news stories and news releases.

Using content analysis, the authors found significant differences in the importance of source, content, and style cues in predicting truthfulness ratings of news stories and news releases: source and style cues predicted truthfulness ratings better than content cues. In the experiment, source credibility was the most important predictor of truthfulness ratings, controlling for individual differences. Experts have higher ratings for news media stories than news releases and lay people have no differences in rating the two news formats.

It is important for health educators to curb consumer trust in misinformation and increase health information literacy. Rather than solely reporting scientific evidence, educators should focus on addressing cues people use to judge the truthfulness of health information.

This is the first study that directly compares human judgments of health news stories and news releases. Using both the breadth of content analysis and experimental causality testing, the authors evaluate the relative importance of source, content, and style cues in predicting truthfulness ratings.

This study aims to assess the relative importance of the argument strength, argument sidedness, writing quality, number of arguments, rated review usefulness, summary review rating and number of reviews in determining the perceived usefulness and credibility of an online review. Additionally, the authors use insights from the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) to explore the effect of consumers' product category involvement on the cues' relative importance.

A conjoint analysis (N = 287) is used to study the relative importance of the seven previously mentioned attributes. A balanced orthogonal design generated eight cards that correspond to individual reviews. Respondents scored all eight cards in a random order for perceived usefulness and credibility.

Overall, argument strength is the most important cue, while summary review rating and the number of reviews are the least important for perceived review usefulness and credibility. The number of arguments is more important for people who are more highly involved with the product, while writing quality and rated review usefulness are relatively more important for the low-involvement group.

This study provides a comprehensive test of how consumers perceive online reviews, as it the first to the authors’ knowledge to simultaneously investigate a large set of cues using conjoint analysis. This method allows for the implicit valuation (utility) of the individual cues, revealing the cues' relative importance, in a setting that comes close to a real-life context. Besides, insights of the ELM are used to understand how the relative importance of cues differs depending on the level of review readers' product category involvement.

The symbolic presentation of products through images in online environments allows consumers to use or experience products only through imagination. Existing literature has demonstrated that providing sensory cues is an effective way to promote imaginative use or experience. However, such an approach seems to have been proposed for product that requires the use of body-related information (e.g. sensory information) for evaluation (high body-involving product). There is less literature on how to facilitate consumers’ imaginative use of product that requires relatively less bodily information (low body-involving product). Considering this, this research proposes a factor that influences the imaginative use of both high and low body-involving products, the character cues in the product image.

In this paper, two studies are conducted to verify the matching effect about presence or absence of character cues with product type (high body-involving vs. low body-involving) in facilitating imaginative use and the downstream effect.

The experimental results indicate that high (low) body-involving product display images are suitable for present (absent) character cues, which can promote the mental imagery of use the product, increase perceived image attractiveness and ultimately increase purchase intentions. The research also verified the influence of distance between the product and the character cues on the above effects.

We expand on the importance of character cues in product display images in an e-commerce environment and enrich the research about imaginative use in online environment.

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed angel investment meetings from in-person to online. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether this move affected angel investors' perception of subjective behavioral cues in pitch sessions within a large Brazilian angel group.

This study followed an exploratory approach using a triangulation process that combined observation, documents and interviews. Data collected by observation, document studies, and interviews were themed, coded, and organized during the research.

The move from in-person to online pitches did not seem to affect levels of trustworthiness or arrogance as angels assessed more message content during Q&A sessions. Body movement, gestures and “eye gaze” (i.e. the look on a presenter’s face) played a central role in passion assessment during in-person meetings. Body language was highly limited during online sessions and tone of voice became the main source of passion assessment.

The findings of this study suggest that pitches at online meetings affect angel investors' perception of founders' subjective cues, particularly cues pertaining to passion. Entrepreneurs should be trained to convey passion with tone of voice and to improve their body language in the context of webcam use. The interviews with volunteer sampling were subject to volunteer bias. Additionally, the findings may be affected by cultural context.

A practical contribution of this study is to highlight the need for entrepreneurs to be trained for online pitches. In an online setting, body language is limited, but it is still possible to use one’s hands and tone of voice to connect better to investors.

This study is unique because it captures the transition of angel investment meetings from in-person affairs before the pandemic to online meetings during the pandemic crisis. These unique circumstances provided a real-world laboratory to observe founders' subjective cue effects on angel investment decision-making.