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Top1. Introduction (Or Motivation For The Study)
With the popularity of online shopping, information seeking plays an important role in the online purchase decision-making process (Hussain et al., 2018; Luo, Luo, & Bose, 2018; C.-C. Teng, Lu, & Huang, 2018). Online reviews form a critical and unavoidable facet of e-commerce, these reviews have a significant impact on consumers purchase decisions as well as the amount of money spent by consumers (Wu, Ngai, Wu, & Wu, 2020). Many studies have paid much attention to consumers’ response to online reviews, few researches pay attention to an integrated effect of characteristics of reviews and consumers. Thus, drawing on the dual of process theory (DPT), this study investigated the influence of online reviews from three aspects: information source, information itself and information receiver. Specifically, content and review picture represent information source, while we choose four attributes of online reviews confirmed by other studies: content quality and picture quality, review volume and source credibility, to see how they affect consumers’ perceived usefulness and attitudes. Furthermore, the usefulness of online reviews also depends on information receiver who are seeking useful information. In this study, perception of social-psychological risks is viewed as a comprehensive index representing the characteristics of information receiver.
To sum, this study adopts a comprehensive approach and theories to analyze the online reviews’ effects on consumer, proposes and empirically tests a comprehensive double dependent variable-DDV model, and presents some managerial and theoretical implications.