Consumer perceptions of information helpfulness and determinants of purchase intention in online consumer reviews of services

By Raffaele Filieri, Fraser McLeay, Bruce Tsui, Zhibin Lin. Information Manager (The), 2018

431 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Online consumer reviews offer an unprecedented amount of information for consumers to evaluate services before purchase. We use the dual process theory to investigate consumer perceptions about information helpfulness (IH) in electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) contexts. Results highlight that popularity signals, two-sided reviews, and expert sources (but not source trustworthiness) are perceived as helpful by consumers to assess service quality and performance. Although two-sided reviews exercise a significant influence on perceived IH, their influence on purchase intention was indirectly mediated by IH. IH predicts purchase intention and partially mediates the relationship between popularity signals, source homophily, source expertise, and purchase intention.

Subfields: Communication, Information Systems and Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/39df94c053c2d93bdff8c567fb32c5cd938cb923

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In Communication

In Information Systems and Management

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

The effect of characteristics of source credibility on consumer behaviour: A meta-analysis (2020, background): “For example, Filieri et al (2018b) found that expertise significantly influences perceived information usefulness of eWOM communications in the context of accommodation and restaurants.”
Setting the future of digital and social media marketing research: Perspectives and research propositions (2020, background): “Source credibility is important in eWOM as expert sources influence information helpfulness (Filieri, 2015), information adoption (Cheung et al., 2009), and purchase intention (Filieri et al., 2018; Ismagilova et al., 2019).”
Extremely Negative Ratings and Online Consumer Review Helpfulness: The Moderating Role of Product Quality Signals (2020, background): “The presence of a large number of reviews on a product reduces the risks perceived by consumers, since a high number of reviews indicates that a product has been purchased by many people, which reduces the uncertainty around its quality and expected performance (Filieri et al. 2018).”