By lowering the costs of gathering and sharing information and offering new ways to learn about products before purchase, the Internet reduces traditional distinctions between search and experience goods. At the same time, differences in the type of information sought for search and experience goods can precipitate differences in the process through which consumers gather information and make decisions online. A preliminary experiment shows that though there are significant differences in consumers' perceived ability to evaluate product quality before purchase between search and experience goods in traditional retail environments, these differences are blurred in online environments. An analysis of the online behavior of a representative sample of U.S. consumers shows that consumers spend similar amounts of time online gathering information for both search and experience goods, but there are important differences in the browsing and purchase behavior of consumers for these two types of goods. In particular, experience goods involve greater depth (time per page) and lower breadth (total number of pages) of search than search goods. In addition, free riding (purchasing from a retailer other than the primary source of product information) is less frequent for experience than for search goods. Finally, the presence of product reviews from other consumers and multimedia that enable consumers to interact with products before purchase has a greater effect on consumer search and purchase behavior for experience than for search goods. Building on this idea, Nelson (1970Nelson ( , 1974 classifies products into search and experience goods according to consumers' ability to obtain product quality information before purchase. Nelson argues that consumers conduct minimal prepurchase information search for experience goods but perform extensive search for search goods. However, several authors (e.g., Alba et al. 1997;Klein 1998;Peterson, Balasubramanian, and Bronnenberg 1997) have suggested that because the Internet enables consumers to learn from the experiences of others and to gather product information that is often difficult to obtain in offline settings (Klein 1998;Lynch and Ariely 2000), it makes all attributes searchable and erases differences between search and experience goods.An alternative perspective on information search is provided by research on how consumers acquire and process information to make decisions (Bettman et al. 1993;Ha and Hoch 1989;Lurie 2004;Lynch and Ariely 2000;Shugan 1980). This research shows that different types of information are associated with different cognitive processes that affect the way information is acquired, the amount of information acquired, and the time spent processing each piece of information (Johnson, Bellman, and Lohse 2003;Johnson and Payne 1985;Payne, Bettman, and Johnson 1988). If consumers seek different information for search and experience goods, this perspective implies that online search and purchase behavior may be different for these two types of goods.This art...

I n the online word-of-mouth literature, research has consistently shown that negative reviews have a greater impact on product sales than positive reviews. Although this negativity effect is well documented at the product level, there is less consensus on whether negative or positive reviews are perceived to be more helpful by consumers. A limited number of studies document a higher perceived helpfulness for negative reviews under certain conditions, but accumulating empirical evidence suggests the opposite. To reconcile these contradictory findings, we propose that consumers can form initial beliefs about a product on the basis of the product's summary rating statistics (such as the average and dispersion of the product's ratings) and that these initial beliefs play a vital role in their subsequent evaluation of individual reviews. Using a unique panel data set collected from Apple's App Store, we empirically demonstrate confirmation bias-that consumers have a tendency to perceive reviews that confirm (versus disconfirm) their initial beliefs as more helpful, and that this tendency is moderated by their confidence in their initial beliefs. Furthermore, we show that confirmation bias can lead to greater perceived helpfulness for positive reviews (positivity effect) when the average product rating is high, and for negative reviews (negativity effect) when the average product rating is low. Thus, the mixed findings in the literature can be a consequence of confirmation bias. This paper is among the first to incorporate the important role of consumers' initial beliefs and confidence in such beliefs (a fundamental dimension of metacognition) into their evaluation of online reviews, and our findings have significant implications for researchers, retailers, and review websites.

No abstract

N o longer the exclusive domain of technology experts, information security is now a management issue. Through a grounded approach using interviews, observations, and secondary data, we advance a model of the information security compromise process from the perspective of the attacked organization. We distinguish between deliberate and opportunistic paths of compromise through the Internet, labeled choice and chance, and include the role of countermeasures, the Internet presence of the firm, and the attractiveness of the firm for information security compromise. Further, using one year of alert data from intrusion detection devices, we find empirical support for the key contributions of the model. We discuss the implications of the model for the emerging research stream on information security in the information systems literature.

No abstract