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Decision aids (DAs) in online retail stores ease consumers' information processing. However, online consumers do not use all decision aids in purchase decision-making. While the literature has documented the effects of individual decision aids or two decision aids at a time, no study has compared the efficacy of multiple decision aids simultaneously. Also, very few studies have looked at the use of decision aids for consumers with maximizing and satisficing tendencies. Hence, this study aims to understand the preferences of maximizers and satisficers towards online decision aids during the choice-making process.

This is an observational study with 60 individuals who were asked to purchase either a search-based or an experience-based product online. Participants' browsing actions and verbalizations during online shopping, were recorded and analysed using NVivo, and later the use of decision aids was mapped along their choice process.

Consumer's preference of decision aids varies across the two stages of the choice process (that is, consideration set formation and evaluation & choice). In their choice formation, maximizers use different decision aids in both stages, that is, filter tool and in-website search tool for search products, and collaborative filtering-based recommender systems and eWOM for experience products. Satisficers used more decision aids as compared to maximizers across the two stages for both product types.

This study is an exploratory attempt to understand how consumers use multiple decision aids present on e-commerce websites.

The purpose of this paper is to employ an integrated technology acceptance model–theory of planned behavior framework intertwined with online risk, e-distrust and product involvement to augment an understanding on consumers’ webrooming behavior.

A mix of convenience and selective sampling was used for data collection. A total of 14 propositions were put forth, which were tested using the structural equation modeling method.

The results of the study revealed that apart from perceived ease of searching online and overall usefulness of the webrooming sequence, perceived search benefits online and purchase benefits offline significantly determined consumers’ webrooming behavior. The results of the study also indicate that webrooming helps consumers avoid the feeling of post-purchase regret of making sub-optimal product choices offline. Online risk perceptions and e-distrust also play a notable role in inhibiting consumers’ from making online purchases, and as a consequence encourage webrooming behavior. The moderating influence of product involvement was observed between consumers’ intentions toward webrooming and webrooming behavior.

The research conducted provides rich insights into understanding the rising webrooming phenomenon. However, more exhaustive studies are needed to arrive at definitive findings concerning the webrooming phenomenon.

The findings of the study can be utilized by the online retailers for formulating strategies to counter webrooming behavior.

The paper is amongst the first few studies which contribute toward enhancing the understanding on webrooming behavior, an emerging issue in the current retailing environment.

The purpose of this study is to propose an integrated framework utilizing the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and technology acceptance model (TAM) to augment the understanding on consumers’ showrooming behaviour.

Selective sampling was used for data collection. The integrated TAM-TPB framework led to 12 propositions, which were tested using partial least squares-structural equation modelling.

Both perceived relative search benefits offline and relative purchase benefits online significantly determined the consumers’ showrooming behaviour along with perceived ease purchasing online and the overall usefulness of the showrooming sequence. Results of the study revealed that the showrooming sequence helped consumers avoid the regret of making suboptimal product choices and paying a higher price for the same product. Online trust was found to partially mediate the relationship between consumers’ intention to showrooming and the actual showrooming behaviour.

Notwithstanding the fact that further research is required to arrive at definitive conclusions, this study is an initial move towards understanding the consumers’ showrooming behaviour, and the research provides meaningful insights.

As showrooming substantially erodes profits, devising strategies to defend showrooming customers becomes crucial. The findings of the study provide the basis for formulating strategies to counter showrooming customers.

The paper is amongst the first studies which helps enhance the understanding of consumers’ showrooming behaviour, which is an emerging area in the present multi-channel retailing environment.

This paper aims to study how price and sales level information influence consumer product perceptions and choices in online settings. It, in particular, tests whether displaying sales level information increases consumer price sensitivity, which is a potential strategic risk to retailers.

Study 1 uses eBay data to investigate whether the interaction effects between price and sales level can be observed in an existing market. Study 2 involves online experiments across three product categories. Participants choose from product pairs that are shown with either the same or different prices and with no, the same or different sales levels.

Study 1 shows strong effects of a product’s displayed sales and price level on its daily sales but finds no interaction effect. Study 2 shows strong effects of price and sales levels on product choice but similarly finds no evidence that sales level information influences consumer price sensitivity, although it reveals an effect on quality perceptions. The results show how perceptions of quality, sacrifice and popularity mediate the effects of price and sales level information on product choice.

Study 1 has limited control over prices and sales levels. Study 2 involves only hypothetical choices.

These findings indicate that businesses can use sales level information to manage consumer product quality perceptions and choices without having to be concerned that this will make consumers more price-sensitive.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate how sales level information affects consumer responses to price differences in online contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of customer care experiences voiced online on consumer choice of brand or company when purchasing products and services by including the level of usage of these sites, and consumer opinions about whether or not their comments would make a difference to the actions of companies.

The theoretical framework of word of mouth is extended to an online environment, electronic word of mouth (e‐WOM), when using consumer opinions about customer care, and a model is suggested using structural equation modeling utilizing data from 320 consumers in the USA.

Consumer opinions about customer care in socially‐based web sites impact consumer opinions and consumer engagement and consequently consumer choice of brand or company when making purchases. The web sites, including government/consumer advocacy information sites, company web sites, and information found through search engines, are not considered important in influencing consumers.

The implications of the study are that companies need to pay attention to the voices of customers on socially‐based web sites and respond appropriately in order to keep customers brand‐loyal. Since this was an exploratory study, it was limited in the number of variables used for testing the hypotheses. The study could be improved by increasing the number of variables that explain online consumer opinions, online engagement and consumer choice of brand or company.

This is an exploratory study focusing on the customer care experience rather than product quality or value provided by companies as discussed by consumers on a variety of web sites. Therefore, it extends the previous works on product quality and value.

The purpose of this study is to examine factors affecting the extent of consumers’ use of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), specifically online product reviews (OPRs), during their decision-making process. It also examines their motives for using OPRs.

The study uses an exploratory qualitative research methodology involving observation and free-flowing face-to-face interviews with consumers who have previously made a purchase online and who read OPRs during the decision-making process. An adaptation of the grounded theory method is used for collection, coding and data analysis.

Findings confirm previously uncovered motives for consumers’ use of OPRs. In addition, the findings suggest that two previously unidentified factors influence the extent of consumers’ use of OPRs: “decision-making drive” and “decision-making drag”. Decision-making drive is a mental momentum created when one or more factors that enhance decision-making readiness are present. This momentum tends to accelerate the decision-making process and shorten the information search process, leading to a reduction in the extent of OPR use. In contrast, decision-making drag is a mental resistance created when one or more factors that impede decision-making readiness are present. This resistance tends to decelerate the decision-making process and lengthen the information search process, leading to an increase in the extent of OPR use.

Focused on the pre-consumption phase of eWOM, between the stages of product need recognition and information search, this study is the first to identify decision-making drive and decision-making drag as additional psychological mechanisms affecting the extent of OPR use by consumers. For marketers, understanding these mechanisms has strategic marketing implications that can provide guidance to brands, websites and online review systems.

Despite its volume, the academic research on the impact of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) on tourism and hospitality consumer behaviour is fragmented and largely limited to investigating a small scope of its impact. The purpose of this paper is to bridge this gap by synthesising the existing literature, providing a conceptual framework for the various dimensions of this impact.

This paper is based on the meta-synthesis and a critical conceptual analysis of relevant academic literature identified using a keyword search of papers via the Web of Science and Scopus databases, followed by a snowballing process comprising tracking the citations to the resources referred to in the identified papers.

This conceptual analysis illustrates how the full spectrum of the impact of eWOM on tourist behaviour spans well beyond the limited scope traditionally focussed on by tourism and hospitality researchers. This scope, encompassing multiple cognitive, normative and affective dimensions, is illustrated in an evidence-based conceptual framework proposed in this paper, providing a systematic tool to identify the less-studied aspects of this important phenomenon.

This paper synthesises the large and fragmented body of literature on eWOM and proposes a novel conceptual framework, illustrating the vast scope of the various cognitive, affective and normative mechanisms through which eWOM affects consumers’ choice of tourism and hospitality products. Furthermore, this paper provides a synthesis of the state-of-the-art of research in this field, highlights the existing gaps and provides researchers with a systematic tool to identify pathways towards breaking the status-quo in progressing beyond the current boundaries of academic research in this field.

游客感知对清真旅游目的地的影响：结构模型分析

尽管有大量研究, 但有关网络口碑eWOM对旅游业和酒店业消费者行为的影响的学术研究仍是零散的, 并且在很大程度上只限于调查其影响的一小部分。本文的目的是通过综合现有文献来弥合这种差距, 为这种影响的各个方面提供概念框架。

本文基于元合成法和对相关学术文献的关键性, 概念性分析。这些文献是通过Web of Science和Scopus数据库对文章进行关键字搜索而确定的。随后是滚雪球式搜索过程, 该过程包括跟踪对已识别文章中引用的资源的引用。

这项概念分析阐述了eWOM对游客行为的影响范围如何远远超出了旅游和酒店业研究人员传统上关注的有限范围。这一范围是基于有理论依据的的概念框架提出的, 并涵盖多个认知, 规范和情感的维度。此范围为识别这一重要且缺乏研究的现象提供了系统的工具。

本文综合了有关eWOM的大量零散文献, 并提出了一个新颖的概念框架, 阐明了eWOM影响消费者选择旅游和酒店产品的各种认知, 情感和规范机制的范围。此外, 本文提供了该领域最新的研究综述, 突出了现有的差距, 并为研究人员提供了系统的识别打破现状的途径, 以超越当前学术界在这个领域的研究局限。

关键字 电子口碑, eWOM, WOM, 酒店, 旅游, 口碑

研究论文

El Boca a Boca Electrónico en el Comportamiento del Consumidor Turístico y Hotelero: Estado del Arte

A pesar del gran volumen de investigación académica sobre el impacto de eWOM en el comportamiento del consumidor turístico y hotelero, esta se encuentra fragmentada y en gran medida se limita a investigar un pequeño alcance de su impacto. El propósito de este artículo, es cerrar esta brecha sintetizando la literatura existente y proporcionando un marco conceptual para las diversas dimensiones de este impacto.

Este documento se basa en un análisis metasíntesis crítico y conceptual de la literatura relevante académica identificada, mediante una búsqueda de artículos por palabras claves a través de las bases de datos de Web of Science y Scopus, seguido de un proceso de “bola de nieve” que comprende el seguimiento de las citas de los recursos mencionados en los artículos identificados.

Este análisis conceptual, ilustra cómo el espectro total del impacto de eWOM en el comportamiento turístico se extiende mucho más allá del limitado alcance que tradicionalmente han realizado investigadores del turismo y hoteles. Este nuevo alcance, que abarca múltiples dimensiones cognitivas, normativas y afectivas, se ilustra en un marco conceptual basado en la evidencia propuesta en este documento, que proporciona una herramienta sistemática para identificar los aspectos menos estudiados de este importante fenómeno.

Este documento sintetiza la gran cantidad de literatura fragmentada sobre eWOM y propone un marco conceptual novedoso, que ilustra el amplio alcance de los diversos mecanismos cognitivos, afectivos y normativos a través de los cuales eWOM afecta la elección de los consumidores de productos turísticos y hoteleros. Además, este documento proporciona una síntesis del estado de la investigación en este campo, destaca las brechas existentes y brinda a los investigadores una herramienta sistemática para identificar vías para romper el statu quo en el progreso más allá de los límites académicos actuales en este campo.

Boca a boca electrónica, eWOM, WOM, Industria hoteleram, Turismo, Boca a boca

– Trabajo de investigación

Although endorsers are thought to be highly effective when they match-up with a product, the current understanding of endorser match-up offers little insight for distinctions between equally attractive and trustworthy endorsers who have equivalent expertise in the product category, yet still diverge in their performance. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to understand how a match between social judgments (i.e. warmth vs competence) of a celebrity endorser and specific advertising appeals (i.e. symbolic vs utilitarian) can improve consumer responses to an endorsement.

A preliminary study empirically distinguishes perceptions of warmth and competence from prevailing celebrity endorser evaluative criteria. Then, the authors conduct multiple 2 (warmth vs competence) × 2 (symbolic vs utilitarian) between-subjects experiments to demonstrate the effect of matching social judgments and advertising messaging, across celebrity genders (i.e. male and female), forms of marketing communications (i.e. print ads and interactive online ads) and types of brands (i.e. well-established and new/unknown).

The findings demonstrate that matching celebrity endorser social judgments with the appropriate type of advertising messaging positively influences consumer response to the brand for both male and female endorsers. Additionally, despite a commonly held belief that celebrity endorsements are more effective at changing attitudes than actual behaviors, for interactive online ads, the authors find that the match strategy can motivate consumer response through two different pathways. For well-established brands, the match improves overall brand response predominately through cognitive and behavioral mechanisms. Alternatively, for new or unknown brands, the match initially impacts affective responses, which are subsequently related to consumers shopping a brand’s product category, rating a brand higher in customer recommendations, choosing a brand’s products over top competitors and paying more for the brand’s offerings.

The main contribution of this research is the demonstrated support for an alternative and effective application of the match-up hypothesis, based on a fit between the endorser and the advertising messaging itself.

When purchasing digital content (DC), consumers are typically influenced by various information sources on the website. Prior research has mostly focused on the individual effect of the information sources on the DC choice. To fill the gap in the previous studies, this research includes three main effects: information cascades, recommendations and word of mouth. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the interaction effect of information cascades and recommendations on the number of software downloads.

The authors use the panel generalized least squares estimation to test the hypotheses by using a panel data set of 2,000 pieces of software at download.cnet.com over a month-long period. Product ranking and recommendation status are used as key independent variables to capture the effects of information cascades and recommendations, respectively.

One of this study’s findings is that information cascades positively interact with recommendations to influence the number of software downloads. The authors also show that the impact of information cascades on the number of software downloads is greater than one of the recommendations from a distributor does.

Information cascades and recommendations have been considered as the primary effects for online product choices. However, these two effects typically are not considered together in one research. As previous studies have mainly focused on each effect, respectively, the authors believe that this study may fill the gap by examining how these effects are interacted to one other to influence customers’ choices. The authors also show that the impact of information cascades on the number of software downloads is greater than one of the recommendations from a system does.

Second-hand/used goods channels compete with existing traditional channels to satisfy consumers’ needs that are unmet by traditional retail networks. However, most studies on online shopping have largely ignored online second-hand/used good purchases. This study aims to use Thaler’s mental accounting model, principal–agent perspective and contamination theory to highlight the differences in the value sought by online new goods and second-hand shoppers.

A conceptual framework linking perceived uncertainty, perceived acquisition value and e-loyalty was developed and tested using structural equation modelling. The moderating effects of product type (new vs second-hand) and frugality were also included.

The paper found strong support for the model. Results showed that online second-hand shoppers were more uncertain and perceived lesser levels of acquisition value when compared to new goods shoppers. They were also less frugal. Online shoppers are also more likely to buy products with sensory attributes (experience goods) in new goods websites and products with non-sensory attributes (search goods) from second-hand websites. The authors recommend various ways in which managers can increase perceived value for the online shopper.

Future studies can extend this investigation by including transaction value or other hedonic values to verify their impact on acquisition value and e-loyalty. While the authors found support for the notion that consumers who buy used goods online are less frugal, there is some research that could point to the opposite. Hence, research can investigate this topic in depth in more countries to throw more light on this.

To sustain themselves in a competitive online market, retailers need to understand the value sought by consumers. This study provides empirical evidence of the importance of acquisition value for new goods and second-hand shoppers.

No recent research has compared the value sought by online second-hand and new goods shoppers. This study contributes to the understanding of the acquisition value perceived by consumers in online new goods and second-hand shopping channels.