It is very important that e-commerce practitioners leverage the technological power (e.g., information control) of the Internet in order to provide consumers with the information they need to make purchasing decisions. In this study, it is hypothesized that, to improve decision-making quality, the degree of information control should be matched to the degree of expertise of consumers. The experiment method was used to test the hypothesis, and 120 student subjects voluntarily participated in the experiment. The empirical results of the study show that experts perform better at decision making in highinformation conditions, whereas novices perform better in low-control conditions. The results of this research strongly support the match hypothesis of information control. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Since commercialization of the Internet in the mid-1990s, business activities on this medium have flourished, and it has become an essential information tool for people. However, the Internet has a unique way of presenting information. How people use this tool to search and process information, and then make purchasing decisions, has therefore become
E‐commerce practitioners have long tried to leverage the technological characteristics of the Internet to facilitate better information seeking and decision making by consumers online. One impressive characteristic of the Internet is that it offers users various degrees of information control on the same medium. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of this characteristic on consumers’ decision‐making online. It is hypothesized that, to improve quality of consumers’ decisions, the degree of information control should match the degree of motivation. The rationale is that highly motivated consumers have a strong will to search for relevant information; therefore, a high degree of information control allows them to search as much as they want and thereby improve their decision making. Low‐motivation consumers, on the other hand, are unwilling to search; hence a low degree of information control, which might push high‐quality information, would benefit them. The study employed the methodology of experiment, and involved 171 voluntary participants. The empirical results show that high‐motivation consumers make better decisions when they are given a high degree of information control, compared to when they are in a low information control condition. On the other hand, low‐motivation consumers in a low information control condition perform better than similar consumers in a high‐control condition. The results strongly support the match hypothesis of information control.
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