Information Presentation in the Online Environment: The Role of Consumer Generated Reviews

Abstract

Regardless of their interest, consumers are exposed to a great amount of information through both off-line and on-line advertising. These exposures to information have been found to influence the decision making of the consumer while purchasing. In this context there is a body of literature (Eveland et al., 2001; Hong et al., 2004, Sicilia et al., 2009) which has studied the influence of the framing and presentation of information on the consumer’s perception. However systematic research on the role of the framing and presentation in an online environment is relatively scarce. This thesis attempts to analyze the influence of different elements of presentation format on consumers’ evaluation of websites. Since user generated information is considered to be more credible and trustworthy (Murray, 1991), i decided to take the review website as the context for my study. A typical review website contains numerous reviews, however only a selected few reviews are processed by the consumers (Lang, 2000). As a consequence of this selective processing of reviews, Perceived Cognitive Effort and Hedonic Experience can be considered as two important psychometric constructs for understanding the influence of presentation format on users’ information processing. In designing a review website a website manager faces the choice of presenting reviews in matrix format or in list format (Display Format Choice). In addition a decision about the amount of control/ interactivity the website should offer has to be made (Information Control Choice). Another choice is in terms of offering reviews in granular form or in an aggregate form (Review Structure Choice). The differential effect of Display Format can be explained on the basis of the difference in the competition for attention among reviews in different presentation formats. Similarly the differential influence of Information Control can be attributed to the decrease in information search costs as a result of using Information Control. The differential impact of Review Structure on the Perceived Cognitive Effort and Hedonic Experience of the users can be linked to the memory aiding property of granular reviews. A 2 x 2 x 2 full factorial between subject design was be used to test the main and interaction effects as hypothesized in the previous section. Since content of real websites varies, the experiment was conducted on websites uniquely created for the purpose of this study. Pilot test was conducted prior to the Main experiment to improve the research design. For analysis of the data MANOVA and linear regression were used. Overall the relationships were found to be stronger and significant for Perceived Cognitive Effort in comparison to Hedonic Experience. Thus the results emphasize that a) Information search process in the review websites is primarily cognitive by nature, and b) The influence of website elements on the mediating and overall attitude towards the website is not additive, the website elements interact and jointly determine the overall influence on the mediating variables and the overall attitude towards the website. Most of the hypotheses (although not significant) were in the direction they were hypothesized. At broader level this thesis contributes in terms of augmenting the literature on information presentation, which is predominantly analytic in nature. At conceptual level the contribution is in terms of the choice of mediating variable; rather than using a single unified variable this research delineates the information processing into cognitive and affective dimensions and thus gives a complete representation of the information search process (Tam & Ho, 2005). At micro level this thesis contributes by operationalization of the information control with high external validity. The managerial contribution is in terms of providing insights to the website mangers. This research integrates manager controlled website design parameters to the important behavioral variable of revisit propensity, through their effects on the intervening psychometric variables. The results of this thesis can help the website manager in choosing the best combination of website design elements in a given context