Word-of-mouth (WOM) study is extended to the on-line context (eWOM) by examining the informational and normative determinants of the perceived credibility of on-line consumer recommendations. A survey of users of an on-line consumer discussion forum in China substantiated the effects of the determinants, although post-hoc analyses revealed that prior knowledge and involvement level moderate some of them. Implications for research and practice are discussed.KEY WORDS AND PHRASES: Credibility, eWOM, informational and normative infl uence, on-line consumer discussion forum.Following the development of network technology, the Internet is permeating almost every aspect of life. One recent phenomenon is the popularity of on-line consumer discussion forums. These consumer forums have millions of registered members with reportedly high hit rates. For instance, daily visits to the discussion forum of www.it168.com, a popular consumer forum in China, are reported to number more than 9 million (www.gdb2b.cn/company/ corporation_web.asp?id=536/). The attraction of the consumer forum is mainly due to a new form of word-of-mouth (WOM) communication, comprising vast amounts of consumer information on opinions and recommendations on vendors/products from experienced consumers. Researchers often refer to this on-line consumer sharing activity as electronic WOM (eWOM) [32,33]. eWOM connects diverse individual consumers and extends and opens up the WOM network from one's immediate contacts to the entire Internet world. As more people utilize product information from the eWOM network to make purchase decisions, the process by which they evaluate the credibility of online consumer recommendations becomes particularly interesting [32]. This is because eWOM arises from a possibly unlimited number of unknown participants, and the presence of vast amounts of unfi ltered information makes the information validity uncertain [22,23,59]. This could raise readers' suspicions about the believability of the on-line reviews [56]. People tend to deliberate on the credibility of eWOM to a greater extent than traditional WOM when seeking on-line product recommendations and will only take on-line advice that they perceive as credible [68]. Prior study has already demonstrated that credibility is one of the most important antecedents of eWOM adoption [47]. As McKnight and Kacmar noted, information credibility is a vital predictor

Drawing upon organizational culture and institutional theory, this study investigates how institutional pressures motivate the firm to adopt Internet‐enabled Supply Chain Management systems (eSCM) and how such effects are moderated by organizational culture. The results of a survey of 131 firms suggest that the dimensions of institutional pressures (i.e., normative, mimetic, and coercive pressures) have differential effects on eSCM adoption intention. While mimetic pressures are not related to eSCM adoption intention, normative and coercive pressures are positively associated with eSCM adoption intention. In addition, organizational culture (i.e., flexibility orientation and control orientation) plays different roles in the relationships between these three dimensions of institutional pressures and eSCM adoption intention. While flexibility orientation negatively moderates the effects of coercive pressures and positively moderates the effects of mimetic pressures, control orientation positively moderates the effects of coercive and normative pressures and negatively moderates the effects of mimetic pressures. Implications and suggestions for future research are provided.

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With the advent of Web 2.0, the business world is fast changing its way of communicating and collaborating. In this study, we regarded the use of instant messaging in team collaboration as a social behavior and examined the changing roles of social influence processes in the formation of usage we-intention (i.e. social intention). Building on the belief-desire-intention model and the social influence theory, an integrated model was developed and empirically tested using survey data collected from 482 students. The results demonstrated that desire partially mediates the effects of group norm and social identity on we-intention to use. In addition, the effect of group norm is more significant for users with lower usage experience, whereas the effect of social identity is more significant for users with higher usage experience. We believe this study provides several important implications for both research and practice.

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