Consumer skepticism and online reviews: An Elaboration Likelihood Model perspective

By Peter J. Sher, Sheng-Hsien Lee. 2009

257 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Online consumers vary in their tendency to believe or disbelieve online reviews. Based on an Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM; Petty & Cacioppo, 1981, 1986), the present study tested the effects of consumer skepticism on online consumers. A total of 278 undergraduates expressed their attitudes about a product in an online experiment. Two findings emerged from the results. First, highly skeptical consumers tend to base their attitudes on intrinsic beliefs instead of situational factors; that is, they are biased against certain types of information and indifferent to the message quality. Second, consumers with low skepticism tend to adopt the peripheral route in forming attitude; that is, they are more persuaded by review quantity. These findings contribute to the ELM research literature by considering a potentially important personality factor in the ELM framework. Managerial implications are suggested.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/441674a34c6a9f0827f6e55ae9c7febe7322a3da

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Citations in the corpus

The influence of online information on investing decisions of reward-based crowdfunding (2017, methodology): “…likelihood model (ELM) is a persuasion theory (Petty and Cacioppo, 1983, 1986), and it is a major theoretical model in online behavior research (Chu and Kamal, 2008; Gupta and Harris, 2005; Ho and Bodoff, 2014; Shih et al., 2013; Park and Kim, 2008; Lee and Youn, 2009; Sher and Lee, 2009).”
Mining customer requirements from online reviews: A product improvement perspective (2016, background): “Previous studies have found that online reviews are much more reliable than the information extracted from other sources [15, 16].”
How do online reviews affect purchasing intention (2009, result): “However, the findings are not consistent with major ELM literatures ( Sher and Lee, 2009 ).”
The impact of electronic word-of-mouth communication: A literature analysis and integrative model (2012, background): “Lee and Youn's [57] study was one of the few research papers that focused on the effects of eWOM in the form of a personal blog.”
Helpfulness of Online Consumer Reviews: Readers' Objectives and Review Cues (2012, background): “Both HSM and ELM have been widely applied to understand how information processing by individuals leads to their decision outcomes in online environments [33, 44, 46, 53, 57, 59, 60].”
The Impact of Perceived e-WOM on Purchase Intention: The Mediating Role of Corporate Image (2015, background): “According to the literatures, purchase intention is one of the most prominent and popular variable resulting from eWOM communication (Sher & Lee, 2009; Lee & Lee, 2009).”